Customize the Management Studio Toolbar

Management Studio is great tool with almost everything you need right at your fingertips.  Notice I said "almost".  I like...

Quick tip: Count table rows in a database, and locate those rows in the data files.

Here are a couple of quick database and table level queries that I have found useful lately.
How many rows in...

Microsoft Surface RT Review

Last Friday, pretty much on impulse, I decided to go to the Microsoft Store in the Park Meadows Mall in...

Countdown to PASS Summit 2012 – 8 to Go – What Is PASS Anyway?

Eight days to go. So after going to my first conference, I was surprised that I did not know more...

Lost in Translation – Deprecated System Tables – sysindexes

This post is part of a blog series which focuses on translating compatibility views in SQL Server to their respective...

Monitor Blocking with Extented Events in SQL 2012

1. Set the "blocked process threshold (s)"
sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1 ;
GO
RECONFIGURE ;
GO
sp_configure 'blocked process threshold', 10 ;
GO
RECONFIGURE ;
GO

here we...

Last Weeks Top 10 “Reading” Links #4

Throughout the week, I like to tweet links to the things that I’ve been reading.  Since they all come out...

Geographic Failover/Redundancy (and DR)

Today we await the arrival of a 100 year storm that threatens to surge New York harbor and the Long...

Amazon Kindle Fire Released

Amazon has released the latest version of it Kindle – the Kindle Fire HD.
It seems amazon are moving away from a...

Countdown to PASS Summit 2012 – 9 to Go – My First Summit

We are less than ten days to the start of PASS Summit 2012. I thought it would be fun to...