Proposed SQL Server defaults: optimize for ad hoc workloads

A few months ago I suggested that the following settings should be the default for most SQL Server instances: Set cost threshold for parallelism to 50 Disable lightweight pooling...

Enable a Named Instance to Connect on 1433

My default setup for a few years is to only use named instances, usually with a standard SQL2014 or SQL 2016 as the name of the instance. Recently, I...
The...

Shrinking a large database with limited outage windows

Yes, I realize you shouldn’t shrink your database (data files or log files), but I recently had a case where ... Continue reading
The post Shrinking a large database with...

SQL Server Diagnostic Information Queries for April 2019

This month, I have just made some minor improvements to most of the query sets, mainly in the comments and documentation. I have been trying to fix the broken...

Database Recovery Monitoring with XE

Database recovery (crash recovery) is a nerve wrenching situation under the wrong conditions. It can be as bad as a root canal and just as necessary to endure that...
The...

How to Fix Databases with High VLF Count

In our earlier posts on recovery, we’ve covered the importance of properly managing SQL Server Transaction Log file growth. This includes how to detect databases with a high VLF...

Adding Custom Error Messages

How to fix the error “String or binary data would be truncated”

Brent Ozar tackles a common error.

Finding Tables with Few Dependencies

This blog post talks about how to find small sets of tables that are joined to each other, but nothing else.

Testing Databases: What’s Required?

Phil Factor reviews the various types of database test that need to run during development work, what sort of test data they require, and the challenges with managing this data, and in keeping the test cell stocked with the correct database, and data, in a way that allows rapid cycles of database testing.