The backup and restore system in SQL Server hasn't changed a great deal over the years despite a huge growth in the typical size of databases. When disaster strikes, and an important service is taken offline while a restore is performed, there is often time to reflect on whether it might be possible to design databases for a more rapid recovery of the most critical parts of a database application.  Read more...

A free day of training, SQL Saturday comes to Tokyo, Japan. Come have a SQL Server day with fellow data professionals if you can.  Read more...

This level will examine the most common problems and forms of mismanagement that lead to excessive growth of the transaction log.  Read more...

Generally, you will have no need to worry about the number of virtual log files in your transaction log. However, if you use the default settings for 'auto-grow', you can end up with such 'fragmentation' in your transaction log as to affect performance noticably. How can this be avoided? How can you tell it's a problem? What do you do about it? Greg explains.  Read more...

One of the most common T-SQL questions is on returning a ranked result set for each member of a group. Dave Ballentyne brings us a short tutorial on how you can do this in T-SQL.  Read more...

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...