I recently discovered the Professional Association of SQL Server (PASS) virtual chapters. For those of you who struggle to make chapter and user group meetings (like me) this can be an excellent way of getting some excellent SQL Server training. I only came across the virtual chapters recently.…

This is just a very short post regarding the use of wildcards in a WHERE Clause

It is possible that the first WHERE clause below can use an Index seek

Where LastName like ‘[a-z]%ent’ can use an index

This second statement will not be able to use a seek…

I run into a small issue at the end last week, a CHECKDB job was reporting corruption on one of my development databases:

Msg 8964, Level 16, State 1, Line 1

Table error: Object ID 965578478, index ID 1, partition ID 72057594042515456, alloc unit ID 72057594052083712 (type LOB data). The…

I have been reading up on instant file initialization and I have read a couple of good blog posts by Kimberly Tripp(http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/kimberly/post/Instant-Initialization-What-Why-and-How.aspx ), Paul Randal (http://www.sqlskills.com/BLOGS/PAUL/post/Misconceptions-around-instant-file-initialization.aspx) and Cindy Gross. From SQL Server 2005 onwards if you grant the SQL Service Account “Perform volume Maintenance tasks” then with…

I didn’t know this bit Resource Governor in SQL Server 2008 is only available in Enterprise edition

We had a request from a developer who wanted to access data from a source database and another database on the same server. We needed to ensure that the underlying tables are not changed in a way that would impact on the view in either database

Prior to 2005 I…

The locks configuration option for SQL Server controls the number of locks available in SQL Server. You can view this through Management Studio by right clicking on the Server in object exploer, selecting and selecting the tab. The default is 0 which allows SQL server to allocate and de-allocate locking…