Do you use the maintenance plans or hate them? Wish they would do more? Curious about how they work under the hood? Cmon, you gotta read this one! Trust us, it's not another "how-to" article! Well, maybe just a little bit!   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...

Quite a while back Andy wrote an article about why not using primary keys and clustered indexes was a worst practice. Chris weighs in this week with a great article that gives some more in depth info on clustered indexes and why he thinks they should be used on every table.   Read more...

This white paper discusses the basics of indexes, such as density and selectivity, effects of many versus few indexes, long versus short keys, covering indexes, and how the SQL Server optimizer chooses indexes  Read more...

Andy sits down with an entry level book to see if he should use it at work as a teaching aid. Did he like it? Should you buy it? Read the review now!   Read more...

In this follow up article Andy looks at how maintenance plans report errors and how they actually accomplish what they do. A little snooping with Profiler reveals all!   Read more...

Do you use the maintenance plans or hate them? Wish they would do more? Curious about how they work under the hood? Cmon, you gotta read this one! Trust us, it's not another "how-to" article! Well, maybe just a little bit!   Read more...