Management tools play a vital role in enterprise database management. This is because the well-integrated tools extend the administrator’s capabilities, whereas a random collection of tools can lead to confusion, operational mistakes, high training costs and poor database administrator (DBA) productivity.

To keep up with these new demands of complex… Read more

From time to time, I see the following question posted on various SQL Server forums by different users asking why the msdb database on their SQL Server instance is too big. As we all know, msdb is a system database that supports SQL Server Agent service, and stores all the… Read more

Checkout the fifth part of my XML support and SQL Server article series here.

In this article, I discussed the basic XML query methods for XML data manipulation. I also gave an brief introduction to the XQuery language, and demonstrated how to use the query(), value(), exist(), nodes(), and… Read more

Today, I’ve received an email from friend asking that that is there any way to find out the progress of following operation using T- SQL query. As we know, with the release of SQL Server 2005, Microsoft provides set of dynamic management views (DMVs) which helps ease the administration SQL… Read more

This dynamic management function (DMF) returns the detailed information about low level activities on indexes such as input/output (I/O) operations, locking and latching contention, and access methods.

You can also use sys.dm_db_index_operational_stats function to find information such as how long the users must wait to read or write to a… Read more

Today, we experienced performance issues with few databases that are hosted on one of our most critical production SQL Server. Upon reviewing the query execution plan and querying index related dynamic management views (DMVs), I noticed the problem is related with potential missing indexes on columns. The index related dynamic… Read more

Today, I received a call from friend asking how he can find out which database object belongs to which filegroup.

Well to find out this information can be achieved by writing a simple query using the following system catalogues: sys.filegroups, sys.indexes, sys.database_files and sys.data_spaces.

For example, here… Read more