There’s a very common belief among DBA’s: Stored procedures are pre-compiled. I had someone tell me all about it just last week. There are lots of sources that say what I’m getting ready to say, so this really shouldn’t come as news to anyone,but it will. No, they’re not. Stored…

A little cheap thrill for me. I passed 50,000 views on the blog yesterday. Thanks to everyone who has stopped by to read my fumbling attempts to understand SQL Server better. I hope some of the posts have proved useful to you. I learn a lot from putting them together.

It is rapidly coming up on election time at the Professional Association of SQL Server users (PASS). Once more, a person I respect and admire is running for office. Tom LaRock has been a volunteer with the organization longer than I have (I’m approaching four years) and for the entire…

I presented last night at the Cape Cod .NET User’s Group. What a great bunch of people. About 20 people showed up at the nice facility they’re using, Venture Think Together. A little pizza and a little chat and the meeting got started. Marcia McLean, their president, gave…

If you’re not a member of the Professional Association of SQL Server users, PASS, why not? No, I’m sorry. I meant to say, If you’re not a member of PASS, you may not have heard about the change between special interest groups and the new Virtual Chapters. What used…

If you present at any level, read this. If you’re thinking about presenting, read this. If you’d like to start thinking about presenting, read this. That is all. Carry on.

Tomorrow night, Wednesday, September 23, I’m going to present on “Best Practices for Working with SQL Server Execution Plans” for the Cape Cod .NET User’s Group.  It’s basically a rehearsal for the presentation that I’ll be doing at the 2009 PASS Summit in just 5 weeks. Can you believe…

I don’t generally do lots of blog aggregation and cross post linking & stuff. It’s just not something I’m that into. However, this time is an exception. Gail Shaw, Gila Monster to those who hang on out SQL Server Central, has posted an excellent explanation of times when Estimated…

It’s not enough to look at the longest running query. What if you have two queries, one runs for 5 minutes and the other runs for 5 seconds. Which do you tune? The first one, of course. But, let’s add a little information to our thought experiment. The one that…

Quest Connect 2009, taking place in October 21 for 24 hours, looks like it’s going to have 64 different sessions, live and recorded, by a variety of the names in the industry. It’s another chance to dig in and learn the details on a variety of topics from…

You could be looking at an execution plan on a query and see this message: Warning, No Join Predicate. With a very few exceptions (very few), that’s not a warning, like “Mind the gap” or “Your Mileage May Vary” or “Never fight a land war in Asia.” No. It’s a…

My first one over there. It’s discussing whether or not you should do two things, build your own monitoring tool, come out in particular favor of one tool or suite of tools from a single vendor. Please read it and watch the video. And, even more importantly, leave a…

Since I just spent a bit more than half of my 24 Hours of PASS presentation on tuning queries talking about monitoring performance, you could probably tell that I think that the two are inextricably linked. I’m not alone. Tom LaRock has put a post on why it’s important to…

I got the question the other day, when are you likely to see a spool in an execution plan? Easy, whenever SQL Server needs to walk through the data multiple times, usually in JOIN operations… Yeah, well, once again, my flip answers are not quite the entire story.

Spool operations…

The new book is up on Amazon. I only worked on three chapters of Rob Walter’s new book and that was after begging to only work on two, so I can’t take much credit for the effort that went into this book. However, thanks to our editor Jonathan Gennick,…