Xp_sendmail is a great utility that SQL Server provides in order to e-mail messages directly from SQL Server, by using a valid MAPI profile. However, its syntax is rather stringent. In this article by Kunal Das, he shows you how to send messages to a list of recipients generated by a query dynamically in T-SQL.   Read more...

One of the biggest performance gains built into SQL Server is the stored procedure. In this article by Brian Kelley, he shows you how to fully utilize, debug and monitor the caching of such objects.   Read more...

Are you using alerts to help you keep track of things? Are you using as many alerts as you should be? Jeremy has a great list of alerts that he considers so important they are on his 'best practice' list. Definitely worth reading.   Read more...

Don't like the blackbox approach of maintenance plans? Like the maintenance plans but need a tweak to suit your needs? New author Robin Back has put together a monster script to allow you to build your own quickly and easily.   Read more...

New author! Mike Pearson discusses how auto close was at the root of a performance problem he was troubleshooting, how you can check your servers easily, and discusses why both auto close and auto shrink are bad ideas in a production environment.   Read more...

A monster book at 980 pages, it's written in 'how-to' format and has a ton of good material. Andy gave it the once over for us and reports back - see what he thinks!   Read more...

Have you ever had the problem where a user ran a query against your SQL Serer and crashed it or made the server unusable since the CPU was spiked at 100%? A SQL Server black box is the equivalent of a flight data record. The black box records all queries being passed to your SQL Server and other useful information like errors.   Read more...

We've had a good run of jobs about job management lately, Randy sent us another one that looks at the job of job management and shows us how he tackled the problem.   Read more...

How many jobs do you have? 10? 100? 1000? Andy makes the point that what works to manage for a small number of jobs doesn't work when that number doubles or triples (well, unless you only had 1 job to start with!). In part one of two, this article looks at ideas for using categories and naming conventions to get things under control.   Read more...

Ever been placed into a new environment and couldn't find an ounce of documentation? This article is the first in a series that will help you make an audit of your new environment and determine if any SQL Server login does not have a password, has a password the same as the login name or a password that is only one character long.  Read more...

One of the biggest performance gains built into SQL Server is the stored procedure. In this article by Brian Kelley, he shows you how to fully utilize, debug and monitor the caching of such objects.   Read more...

Running a script automatically from SQL Server is easier than you think. Here are a few methods you can use.   Read more...

Xp_sendmail is a great utility that SQL Server provides in order to e-mail messages directly from SQL Server, by using a valid MAPI profile. However, its syntax is rather stringent. In this article by Kunal Das, he shows you how to send messages to a list of recipients generated by a query dynamically in T-SQL.   Read more...

This article describes the ActivityTrace7 job that puts blocking and performance data into a trace file for further analysis.   Read more...