Locking While Dropping or Altering an Index

Yesterday I was trying to drop some hypothetical indexes in production against a fairly active table. I started causing blocking...

Pragmatic Tools Week: Task Factory

If you've ever spent any time doing SSIS development work, you'll eventually come to a point when developing something and...

DBA VC Presentation May 11

Come one, come all!!  Oh wait, it’s too late now.  I just finished giving my presentation to the DBA VC (virtual chapter).  There was good attendance and there were...

DBA VC Presentation May 11

Come one, come all!!  Oh wait, it’s too late now.  I just finished giving my presentation to the DBA VC...

T-SQL: Identifying, inserting and removing spaces in strings

Frequently, when working with strings you will need to identify, insert or remove spaces before, after or in between characters.
For example, you may...

Troubleshooting Performance -1

Whenever you get a call from user that they are facing any performance issue what would you do. As I...

Patch Week

My email account started getting notices of Windows patches yesterday, indicating it’s patch week again. If you manage Windows devices,...

Networking and Connections

This quote says it all:

It’s from an article on the 9/11 memorial and how an algorithm was used to inscribe...

PASS Summit 2011 Session Preference Survey

PASS has added a new feature to the session selection process for the PASS Summit 2011, which they are calling...

Dirty looking SQL or MDX? Clean it up

A quick tip for you:  Ever get some SQL or MDX sent to you in an email, or copied from a...