SQL’s auto-updating statistics go a fair way to making SQL Server a self-tuning database engine and in many cases they do a reasonably good job

However there’s one place where the statistics’ auto-update fails often and badly. That’s on the large table with an ascending column where the common queries… Read more

Earlier this week I took part in the 24 Hours of PASS live webcast event. There were far more questions at the end of the presentation than what I could answer online, so the answers to the rest are given here. (I have edited some of the questions for spelling,… Read more

There have been a large number of posts made regarding the interaction between full database backups and the log chain (like this one). However there still seems to be a lot of confusion around regarding how they interact. I doubt I can clear up the confusion with yet… Read more