In general, if I'm going to have to fix it, I want control over it. It's that simple. They're trying to give you the responsibility without giving you the authority....

That's an extremely open-ended question. The problem is, the daily duties vary from one organization to the next. Further, they vary from one group within the organization to the next....

I'll be perfectly honest, I don't understand most of what you're trying to describe.

From the description, you've wondered extremely far afield of traditional relational storage. As soon as you...

The query engine will do what it does. That's in the internals. No way to know without a debugger or insider knowledge. It will use tempdb though.

And you really can't use those costs to compare one query to another because of what everyone else has said. Within a given query, you have to use the costs...

Estimated IO cost is only partly based on page count. But, the fact that you're getting discrepancies is the beginning of what might be the issue. Have you looked at...

I've got a poster over at AskSSC that is utterly confusing me. He's either very unclear, or I'm very obtuse or some combination of the two. If anyone with an...

Instead of opening it up within the GUI, just run a query directly against it using sys.fn_xe_file_target_read_file

The best resources to learn about internals are the Books Online and the book SQL Server Internals by Kalen Delaney, et al. Benjamin Nevarez book is also a pretty good...

Refer back to the number of pages in the indexes. You can use sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats (I think that's right, typing from memory) to see the size of the index or table.

Just remember that simply adding files won't always speed things up. It's adding files with additional disks under them that really makes a major difference. But, then you have to...

You should be able to get all the answers to your questions from the Quest web site. It's all there.

The blog can show the stuff you're learning too. It doesn't just have to be "look at me, I'm awesome." In fact the posts that say "Hey, I ran into...

Jeff Moden (2/22/2013)

I've been up to my eyes with work and they only have SQL Server 2005 so I haven't even broken the surface on Extended Events. That explains...

Instead of running XML queries against the server, a relatively high process event, I'd output the Extended Events to a file, then you can read that file from another server...