New Cumulative Updates for SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 R2

Late Monday night (October 18, 2010), Microsoft released the latest Cumulative Updates for SQL Server 2005 and for SQL Server...

This is What Task Manager Looks Like When You Restart the SQL Server Service

This is what Task Manager looks like in Windows Server 2008 R2 when you restart the SQL Server Service. This...

Birds of a Feather Lunch at PASS 2010 Summit

The volunteers at PASS (especially Mike Walsh) have organized another “Birds of a Feather” lunch event on Tuesday, November 9...

What are Physical Sockets, Physical Cores, and Logical Cores and Why Does it matter?

I witnessed a confused conversation on Twitter today where someone was talking about how he uses the terms sockets and...

SQL Server Memory Related Queries

What is using all of my memory in SQL Server?  If you ever believe that you are seeing signs of...

CPU-Z Support For Sandy Bridge Processors

The CPUID website has a screenshot of CPU-Z 1.55.2, showing its support for the upcoming 32nm Sandy Bridge processor, which...

Stupid Tech Support Tales

One of our desktop support technicians noticed the following error from a 3rd party vendor application in an error log:

"9/22/2010...

Geekbench 2.1.7 Released

If you read my blog or follow me on Twitter, you know that I have a strong interest in database...

A Small Selection of SQL Azure System Queries

I had a question come up during my “Getting Started with SQL Azure” presentation at SQLSaturday #52 in Denver last...

Windows Power Plans and CPU Performance

Back in February, 2010, I did some preliminary testing on the effects of various BIOS settings and Windows Power Plans...