Start with the Microsoft documentation. Always start with the Microsoft documentation. But, there are also 3rd party resources such as Tim Ford and Louis Davidson's excellent book.

Frequently, yes. Because you're going to lavish attention on that instance, know when it's running, possibly set up some type of high availability for it, etc. Yes, if you have...

You're talking Azure VMs, not SQL Azure which is the platform as a service offering, not infrastructure.

As far as disks go, the only ones available currently are through Azure blob...

You're comparing apples to hammers.

The procedure cache within SQL Server is for caching query execution plans for the queries running within SQL Server. It does this to avoid recompiling queries...

The best thing to do is not share resources with anything. sQL Server just doesn't play well with others. But, it doesn't sound right that just reducing the amount of...

You can use a statement level trace event, but, be very cautious because those generate a ton of data and might have a negative impact on performance, even if you...

Differences in statistics are the more common explanation for differences in execution plans.

If the files are "locked" it sounds like a SQL Server instance is actively using them. You may want to look into the process for taking a database backup to...

rodjkidd (4/23/2014)

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Any of the Threadizens going to SQL Saturday in Chicago this weekend?

I'm over for some more SQL Skills training, so thought I might as well attend.

Looks as though a...

You sure it's a complete rebuild? Nothing has inserted a row? It's not doing an incremental build? The behavior is pretty consistent from what I've seen. But then, if it's...

It has to do with if there have been rows inserted into a table since it was created. If you have tables that are new or truncated, you'll see the...

Yeah, this. I said OPENQUERY, but OPENROWSET was what I was thinking about.

Thanks David.

Since we're talking SQL Server 2012, I strongly advise against using trace for this. Extended events are much more efficient at this type of data collection. The amount of data...

The problems are much more often located in the T-SQL code and the database structures than they are on the hardware. SQL Sentry does a good job of identifying the...

Unfortunately, there really isn't any sort of automated method for tuning queries. It's actually somewhat hard work requiring quite a bit of specialized knowledge. The two books down in the...