A free day of training in Albuquerque, New Mexico on Feb 9, 2013.  Read more...

Have you ever had to write a bunch of TSQL to do some data analysis on the table data in your database. If you have you'll know that this can become a fairly time consuming and tedious task? SQL Server 2012 Integration Services has a feature called the Data Profiling task that can help you perform this analysis much easier and faster (this feature is also available in SQL Server 2008). This task can help you find potential issues with your existing data as well as help you become more familiar with the data in a database that you have just started managing.   Read more...

By capturing baseline data, a well=prepared DBA should get a good idea of what potential issues they will face. In this article Erin Stellato looks at Wait Statistics and what they can tell you about your databases.  Read more...

Come join Steve Jones, Grant Fritchey and an amazing lineup of speakers at the spring SQL Intersection conference in Las Vegas, April 8-11, 2013. Register now and you get a Surface RT tablet.  Read more...

There are certain circumstances where SQL Server will silently truncate data, without providing an error or warning, before it is inserted into a table. In this tip we cover some examples of when this occurs.  Read more...

This is part I of III in a series on the physical join operators in SQL Server.  Read more...

A new custom metric is available at SQL Monitor Metrics. This tracks indexes that have more writes than reads. Use this code if you want to find out if you might be over indexing your tables.  Read more...

Marcin Policht presents the fundamental principles of PowerShell in the context of SQL Server 2012. Join him as he steps through its initial setup and configuration, and reviews specific management areas where its advantages can be realized.  Read more...

SQL Server expert David Poole discusses how teams can work together and share templates in Management Studio.  Read more...

In earlier installments of this series we looked at T-SQL Performance optimizations along with different T-SQL practices, we can now turn our attention to the second part of this series which is index Tuning  Read more...

The list of builds for SQL Server 2008 updated SP3.  Read more...

In this Level, we’ll look at how to use XML methods within user-defined functions to return XML fragments and values from your target XML instance.   Read more...

As a production Database Administrator, I do not want to give Developers direct access to the SQL Server Agent job log especially for servers in the DMZ. Another problem we have is that when there is a lot of log data for a job, the default job log doesn't contain the full log detail and that makes it harder to troubleshoot. Most of all, we are trying not to use a different code set for deployment based on the environment. Basically we want to use the same methods to deploy our jobs to Development, Test and Production.   Read more...

How do you recover from corruption if your organization doesn't have a disaster recovery handbook? And how can you prevent the same corruption from recurring?  Read more...

A list of the builds of SQL Server 2012 through CU#4.  Read more...

This articles shows a technique that generates and launches an SSIS package to update statistics in parallel.  Read more...

The most critical task for all DBAs is to have a Backup and Recovery strategy that ensures, every day, that in the event of a disaster they can restore and recover any database, within acceptable limits for data loss and downtime. Even with all the required backups in place, it's easy to miss subtle failings in the overall plan that can, and eventually will, defeat your recovery plans.   Read more...