Don't give the presenters rum until after their presentations.

Nah, you don't really need anything. Something to take notes. Other than that, be ready to network, ask questions, engage. Lots...

DBA is a huge job covering lots of different aspects of technology. For a good general description of the position, I'd suggest Craig Mullins book, Database Administration. It's a little...

I've never noticed clustering affecting backup speed before. So, I'd be more suspicious of the virtual machines preventing you from getting proper throughput to the SAN, not the cluster causing...

Thing is, those are two different queries. The IN statement can act to filter the results of ABC, but none of the columns from ABC1 are available in the SELECT...

If the indexes are less than a 8 pages in size, they won't take a full extent and you'll never get complete defragmentation. You may be seeing fragmentation going up...

You can use third party tools to explore the log. They work, but won't supply information that's not there as Gail points out. I think Apex SQL has a log...

Sure, but you have to use the 64-bit client. Microsoft has it documented here.

I can't see all the configuration, but it looks like you have an instance name of MSSQLSERVER, but the connection is trying to connect to SSSQLSERVER. Possibly change that S...

Jeff and Wayne and Jason and Jack and me are all at SQL Saturday #156. What happened? Did the rest of you miss the memo?

Gianluca Sartori (9/14/2012)

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On a totally unrelated note, I'm preparing my slide deck for my first session as a speaker.

I never thought it could be that hard!

I know exactly what I...

The simplification step in the optimization process can clean up issues with views, but not always and not always all the way. Depending on what's there, you might be better...

Looking at this, the first thing I'd suggest is you update your statistics. They're pretty badly out of wack. That might be why you're getting such an expensive plan. You're...

Where do I go to volunteer?

Those are valid counters and will show how your system is behaving. They're the same counters you get from running Performance Monitor. You can also look at sys.dm_exec_query_stats to see...

Yeah, TDE gets you encrypted backups. Other than that, you need to look at something like Red Gate SQL Backup[/url]. We do encryption and password protection. The tool also provides...