Who’s using that database?

A common problem when trying to alter a database (take it offline, add a filegroup, whatever) is that someone else...

“Thing IS NOT NULL” isn’t the same as “Thing != NULL”

I’ve talked about NULLs before. (Ref: Here’s a bit on ISNULL(), and here’s one about understanding NULL at a basic level.)...

How To Speak At SQL Saturday Events

The PASS SQL Saturday events are meant to be a place to grow the pool of speakers, provide a mechanism...

Keep VM snapshot growth from wrecking your day

VM snapshots are one of the best virtualization features ever. But…have you ever had a VMware vSphere or Hyper-V snapshot...

Making Sense of PCIe SSD Use with SQL Server

When Fusion IO burst onto the scene in 2007, offering a PCIe card that was said to be able to...

Review of Minion Reindex

Back in October 2014 Midnight SQL released v1.0 of Minion Reindex, a free, open source index maintenance solution. I’m all...

Statistics on UNIQUEIDENTIFIER columns

During the SQLRally conference in Copenhagen/Denmark, Brent Ozar (Blog, Twitter) and I had a very interesting conversation regarding Statistics on...

The Demo Setup–Attaching Databases with Powershell

I found another use for Powershell, one actually suggested by someone else: attaching specific SQL Server databases.
TL;DR I have a...

There are #temp tables and then there are ##temp tables.

Temporary tables are a common enough thing in T-SQL that most of us have probably used them on a fairly...

Date Range Challenge in sql

Hi Folks,

When you work in a offshore - onsite setup in IT industry and if you are fortunate 🙂 to be a...