Excellent article TJ. Congratulations on a well ordered process.

Any chance of posting the code for the procs that start the traces? I'm curious about some of the details of how...

Updating the stats will certainly lead to changes in the query plan, depending on what happened in the stats. It's possible that you had a plan that was working well...

Piling on.

I've seen that standard before. I don't care for it, but as long as it's applied consistently, it's readable and it won't hurt anything.

Usually just the opposite. Not updating stats for ages on end leads to slower & slower running procs and then the stats get updated and everything speeds up.

It could be...

Yay!

Damn, I really wish I could have gone to Tech-Ed.

Is there a question in there that I'm missing?

Michael's works. Another way to the same window is to drill down on the table in question so that you see the "Constraints" folder. Right click and select "New Constraint..."

The first time I created the rule, it took a while for it to actually gather the data. I'm assuming that was time spent sending everything out to all the...

I'm not sure why you'd want to manage by FileGroup, but... What if you set up the same process that I outlined, but used this query to gather the data....

I'd say the CASE statement (sans variables) or the UDF are your best bets. You'll need to test them both to know for sure which works better with your structures.

I have to say, that's not a shape for an execution plan that I've seen before. Like the others have said, concentrate on the scans. You're missing JOIN predicates which...

File groups, I'm working on. Several people have asked the same question. I'll post something as soon as I have a complete story.

Custom reporting, since these properties are collected just...

As GSquared pointed out above, table variables work in a similar fashion. Statistics aren't maintained on them (except when there is a primary key) so the optimizer always assigns them...

A fine idea. I'll have to try that. Thanks.

Of course the next thing you should worry about is stacking all the fixed length, non-nullable fields at the front of the page... There's a lot of things you can...