This article attempts to explain RAID's impact on SQL performance.  Read more...

Happy Thanksgiving from everyone at SQLServerCentral.  Read more...

Merry Christmas from SQLServerCentral. We spend much of our working life helping solve SQL Server-related performance problems, hands-on, during consulting, or on online forums. We've seen a few weird-and-wonderful issues but, mainly, it’s the same problems and misconceptions time-and-again. This is our attempt to describe, diagnose, and solve the most common problems with SQL Server 2005, 2008, and 2008 R2. And it's free.  Read more...

Check tempdb to see if it has been autogrown since the last restart. If it has, there may be an opportunity to improve server performance.  Read more...

Recently we started experiencing a very strange issue in our production reporting environment where the Re-indexing and Update Statistics operation suddenly began taking more than 2 days to complete and was thus causing blockage in the database which in turn caused impairment in application performance.  Read more...

SQL Saturday in the Ukraine. If you want a free day of training, sign up and attend.  Read more...

When you have SSAS cubes with millions of rows of data, it is very helpful to create partitions. If you have a few cubes you could probably do this manually, but if there are many or if you want to automate this process you should look for smarter solutions such as programming the creation of partitions dynamically.   Read more...

It is widely acknowledged within the SQL Server community that baselines represent valuable information that DBAs should capture. Unfortunately, very few companies manage to log and report on this information, and DBAs are then forced to troubleshoot from the hip and scramble to find evidence to prove that the database is not the problem. This article will make a compelling argument for why DBAs must start capturing baseline information, and will create a roadmap for subsequent posts.  Read more...

A free day of SQL Server Business Intelligence sessions in Tampa, FL tomorrow.  Read more...

The final day of Simon's journey to improve his OLAP knowledge and build a prototype cube.  Read more...

SQL Server Failover Clustering, which includes support for both local and multisite failover configurations, is part of the SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn implementation suite, designed to provide high availability and disaster recovery for SQL Server. The multisite failover clustering technology has been enhanced significantly in SQL Server 2012. The multisite failover cluster architecture, enhancements in SQL Server 2012 to the technology, and some best practices to help with deployment of the technology are the primary focus of this paper.  Read more...

This article explains how to use the GROUPING clause to generate subtotals for rows in a very easy fashion.  Read more...

Day 6 brings security enhancements.  Read more...

In this sequel to his first "Hierarchies on Steroids" article, SQL Server MVP Jeff Moden shows us how to build a pre-aggregated table that will answer most of the questions that you could ask of a typical hierarchy. Any bets on whether Santa is packin’ a Tally Table in his bag or not?  Read more...

SQL Server 2012 enhanced the SQL Server 2008 FileStream data type by introducing FileTable, which lets an application integrate its storage and data management components to allow non-transactional access, and provide integrated SQL Server services. Arshad Ali explains how.  Read more...