I was looking at performance of a database and I noticed a few of the plans were very large and timing out in the optimizer. This made me wonder, just how many of them were timing out?

This sounds like a job for XQuery!

There’s really nothing to it. Once… Read more

Did you ever accidentally close SQL Server Management Studio? And, in closing SSMS, did you get the prompt that says “Save changes to the following items?” And did you, completely unthinkingly, with a query you had just been working on, hit Cancel? Yeah, me neither. What kind of idiot does… Read more

SQL Azure is still SQL Server at the end of the day. This means it is entirely possible to write queries against SQL Azure that really… what’s a good word… stink. So what do you do? It’s all in the cloud. You couldn’t possibly tune the queries, right? Wrong. Many… Read more

This year the PASS organization is asking us to vote on the PASS Summit 2011 sessions, not as a means of picking them, but rather as a way to tell where there interests that may not be fulfilled. However, we all know it’s down, to a degree, to a popularity… Read more

I’ve put in several abstracts for the 2011 Summit. This year we’re voting for preferred sessions. If you’re interested in any of the ones I’ve listed below, please consider giving me a vote.I was very kindly invited to submit for a spotlight session (for which I am very grateful… Read more

There’s a project over on code plex to come up with a mechanism for validating databases and generating the necessary scripts to allow you to move those databases, and data, over to SQL Azure. It’s called the SQL Azure Migration Wizard. There’s no real install yet since it’s just a… Read more

Tom LaRock has a new meme for Meme Monday. It’s all about the problems caused in your system other than disks. Thankfully, despite the title, I don’t have to list 99 separate things, only 9, but you know what, 99 is possible. I’m going to present the problems. You find… Read more

When last we left our intrepid hero he had successfully deployed to SQL Azure using the Data-Tier Application Package, a DAC pac. It was easy and I had a database in place in nothing flat. There really weren’t any issues worth mentioning. I wasn’t crazy about the fact that unless… Read more