Hey, I have a client who's CEO is still hacking out code - - COMPLETELY OUTSIDE of the IT department's control processes no less!! :-))

Nice rant Jeff!! :-))

As for a cursor that also uses parallelism . . . YUCKO!!! If the threshhold for parallelism is still set at the default of...

Is TCP/IP enabled for the sql server? Make sure Shared Memory network protocol is enabled and top of the list, then AS should use that preferentially since it is...

1) There is a benefit to having a clustered index on an identity, even for single row lookups: you don't have to do a bookmark lookup to get to...

Bob, where did you read that SET ROWCOUNT was deprecated in 2005? I only found this statement in BOL: Using SET ROWCOUNT will not affect DELETE, INSERT, and...

The example I gave was not necessarily indicative of your situation. My example was a single table, filtered on a non-indexed column. IIRC, your OP had a query...

Since you now bring up SAN, what is the layout of the LUNs and also the file placements for both the db that is having perf issues as well as...

1) Yep, you should ALWAYS use the CORRECT DATATYPE in TSQL. It really can make an INCREDIBLE difference in performance!!

2) In addition to MAXDOP 1, if you have 4+...

Anders, your suggestion to count matching rows first IS useful under a few specific circumstances. First and foremost is that the count MUST be able to use indexing to...

You can have 2000 and 2005 on same box. I believe it is recommended to install 2000 first in this situation.

1) If you say SELECT TOP 10 from a table with a kajillion records and only 9 meet your where clause, you bet that sql server will exhaustively complete it's...

1) Are there indexes on the table being inserted into? Index maintenance can cause more page splits and thus delays. Speaking of page splits, are your fill factors...

Not sure what tests you did. Try this one. As you can see, the single-pass mechanism used by the partition query is significantly more efficient than the second...

good correction noeld. I missed that the first example didn't have the partitioning.

1) Why do you restrict the use of temp tables or table variables?

2) I think this is a better version of the rownumber code posted above. It avoids the...