I read this awesome post by Joe Sack, titled “Detecting Cardinality Estimate Issues with sys.dm_exec_query_stats”.

I was amazed by the beauty of his detection query, ran it on my environment, and discovered some interesting things.

Then I revised it a little to reveal more information and filter out more… Read more

In continuation with my previous post on Creating a SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) Project, you will now learn how to create a Shared Data Source within that project. In this post I compare and contrast Shared and Embedded Data Sources and demonstrate how to create a Share Data… Read more

1. To get the location of SQLServer Agent log file, the log file is called SQLAGENT.out

DECLARE @AGENT_ERRORLOG NVARCHAR(255)

EXECUTE MASTER.DBO.XP_INSTANCE_REGREAD N’HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE’,

N’SOFTWAREMICROSOFTMSSQLSERVERSQLSERVERAGENT’,

N’ERRORLOGFILE’,

@AGENT_ERRORLOG OUTPUT,

N’NO_OUTPUT’

SELECT @@SERVERNAME SERVERNAME, @AGENT_ERRORLOG AGENTERRORLOGLOCATION

This command will work for both default & named instance.

2. To modify location and name of SQLServer… Read more

Welcome to day 24 of my 31 Days of Disaster Recovery series. Previously, I’ve talked about several different forms of corruption: Nonclustered Index, Allocation Pages, and Tempdb. these were all fairly simple to fix. Today I’m going to dive into a scenario that is a little more complex, clustered indexes.…

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I’m going to Nottingham, England, fabled home of Robin Hood, where I’m going to eat fish and chips and talk about SSIS.  How’s that for tying seemingly unrelated topics together?

I’m happy to report that in addition to my full-day preconference seminar at SQLBits, I’ll also be delivering a… Read more

We got a call last week about an application that was running slowly. The server was showing about 80% CPU utilization consistently, IO was through the roof etc. It was taking something like 15-20 seconds to log in (doesn’t seem like much unless you are used to 4 or 5).… Read more

This weekend of SQL Saturday #183 in Albuquerque, NM. It’s the first SQL Saturday in that state, and it’s a relatively short drive from Colorado. Six hours from my house, S of Denver, and a nice city. My brother used to live there, and I made a few trips to… Read more

Recently I was brought in to help troubleshoot performance issues on a database server.  Going through my typical check list I noticed memory pressure on the box and made the recommendationof more memory which was simple to fix. What caught my attention though was that blocking was occurring on a… Read more

I’ve been exploring execution plans in Azure SQL Databases a lot lately. I’m getting a presentation together for  some upcoming SQL Saturday events (first one is SQL Saturday #177, Silicon Valley). If you scroll to the bottom of this previous post, I mentioned that there were clearly differences… Read more

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Earlier on my blog I posted about how you can attach a database using T-SQL when no log file is available. You can catch that here. In this post we will see how it can be attached using GUI.

To attach a database with no .ldf file, follow below… Read more

by Steve Bolton

                Anyone who has been following this series of self-tutorials has probably grown accustomed to me adding some kind of disclaimer about my shortcomings as a data miner. These blog posts are designed to simultaneously give the most under-utilized part of SQL Server some badly needed free press,… Read more

If you have not signed up for the 24 Hours of PASS-Business Analytics you should be.  This is a great chance to hear 12 speakers (they will be repeated in the following 12 hours).  Topics are varied from Big Data to Strategy to Collaboration.  Most importantly you can’t beat the… Read more

During the last few years I've worked extensively with transactional replication and have written a handful of scripts that have found a permanent home in my "useful scripts" toolbox. I've provided these scripts as downloads whenever I've presented about replication...but not everyone who has worked with replication has been to… Read more

Have you ever needed to figure out which filegroup your tables are located within?  If you had to do this, you might think it’s as easy joining sys.tables to sys.filegroups.  But its a little more complicated than that because tables aren’t stored in filegroups.

It’s The Indexes

It’s the… Read more

A tribute is an expression of gratitude or praise. Last year I started a series about individuals who have impacted my career. I do this as a tribute to my father-in-law, Ed Jankowski who passed away a few years ago. Check out my original post about him and his impact… Read more

This is an annoying problem I have had a few times: I open a SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) project in SSDT, and see that the Toolbox pane is empty, displaying a “There are no usable controls in this group.  Drag an item onto this text to add it to… Read more

As a former mentor Christian is used to me asking him all sorts of random questions, but this time it’s going to be published online. I’d also like to thank you for allowing me to be a technical reviewer in your latest book: Professional SQL Server 2012 Internals and Troubleshooting. Read more

SQL Server clusters are widely used, and widely misunderstood, which makes people like our good friend (and clustering MVP) Allan Hirt cry bitter tears. So here are a few notes for you and yours.

Cluster IS NOT Disaster Recovery

A cluster does not protect against disaster. Unless it’s a very,… Read more

This is the second installment in this series of SQL Server Reporting Services 2012 Beginner posts. You can read the previous post here. If you are wondering why Beginner, please read the SQL Server 2012 for Beginners post to learn more. With that, let’s get started.

Before you can… Read more