Any time you need to write a query, I usually take the approach of breaking it down into steps. For example, you need to see the average cost for each...

If you run a query against sys.dm_exec_requests as I specified while the query is running, before it times out, you can see if it's getting blocked. That's what I would...

It's one of the easiest upgrades I've ever done in SQL Server, but paranoia never hurts. I'd suggest running the upgrade advisor first.

It sounds like a blocking issue. You can use the software suggested or just look at sys.dm_exec_requests to see if there are processes holding locks that will prevent your query...

You can even create filtered statistics in a similar fashion to help the optimizer.

As long as they are calling procedures or creating parameterized queries, not really. It might tend to bloat the cache a little depending on how the calls are generated since...

Ha! Doubtful. That requires actual brains & skills....

dbursey (4/18/2013)

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From the other side of the fence - I've asked questions here and got ripped a new one because I didn't provide actual examples - sometimes it's hard to...

Late to the game, but well done Jason & Wayne.

You can query the execution plan from the plan cache. The execution plan will show how the query was resolved and will include if indexes were referenced at all and...

Yeah, it's a server level setting.

Congratulations on your first article. Nice work.

For the future, a few suggestions that might help. Doing a how-to article like this is great. But you also need to include guidance...

Any of the Threadizens going to be in Vegas for SQL Intersection this week?

For larger data sets, I'd work on getting rid of that DISTINCT operator. It's going to lead to issues because of the aggregation. But, leaving everything roughly the same, I...

What kind of database server are you connecting to? If it's a 2000 box, or a database set to 2000 compatibility on a 2005 or 2008 box, then you won't...