In general, more disks can improve performance, not generally hurt it. But, you also have to have more controllers to really achieve meaningful benefits. In general, based on what you're...

Your second query, the UNION, is getting a timeout from the optimizer. That means the plan is likely to be suboptimal. I'd suggest looking at ways to simplify the query....

I meant internal memory measurements within SQL Server such as ConnectionMemory, DatabaseCacheMemory or FreeMemory. In theory you should be able to look at all the these and see what the...

You should look to the execution plan to understand what is happening in your query and how the optimizer is choosing to select your data.

Lots of NOLOCK in there. That's scary.

One thing you can do that will immediately help performance, whether you keep the recompile in place or not. The IF statement puts the...

Right with you til #5 Kevin. NEVER use ALWAYS and ALWAYS avoid NEVER. 😛

Not seeing the query, I can't say what's going on, but, on a guess, you're probably seeing some sort of bad parameter sniffing issue where the plan you generated after...

Total Memory is the amount that SQL Server has allocated. Your average server will allocate as much memory as it can and then keep it. So this counter will generally...

thisted (10/30/2013)

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There are multiple indexes on the table. There is one that hasn't had a seek, scan or lookup, but has been updated 223,000,000 times. There's another...

Tune the queries should always be the first option. Deadlocks are primarily a performance related issue.

Another option is to look at using one of the snapshot isolation levels, read_committed_snapshot for...

Yep, you got it.

One point. You might want to consider skipping reorganize. For most indexes it doesn't do much, but is still a fairly costly operation. For detailed testing on...

Open a command window and try running the command directly from there. That will allow you to see the window and error messages as they occur. Another option is to...

Jeff Moden (10/29/2013)

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Chad Crawford (10/29/2013)

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We use the scale of 1-10 to help give us an idea of how tough to start the interview questions, but we usually give the...

Kurt W. Zimmerman (10/29/2013)

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I ran into this very same problem a number of years ago. I was managing a database on a hosted/managed service. Turned out that the...

You have a disconnected differential and full backup. Some other process is running full backups between the time you ran yours and you ran the differential. You won't be able...