Since you're in 2008, you can take advantage of the system_health Extended Events session. system_health contains deadlock information that you can query as outlined here (yeah, yeah, RDS, but...

I generally advocate against using the ring buffer. It affects the memory of the server in a negative way, worse than simply negative depending on what you're capturing. Instead, I...

Is the query scanning the existing index or seeking against it? If it's a seek, and it's the cluster, I'm not entirely sure you'll see much of an improvement with...

Keep an eye on CPU and waits, before and after.

Thanks for the feedback, Grant.  I am concerned.  While I wouldn't expect such a thing to be "radical" in a test and development environment, seeing "some" thrash and having...

Have any of you good folks used the "Automatic Tuning" feature of SQL Server 2016 for on-prem?  If so, how'd it work out for you?

I ask because I have...

Grant,

Thank you for your input. It is as valuable for me as all your comments and guidance always are, both here at SSC and in your books (I can...

Meh.

It's a very mixed bag. It can improve performance a little in some workloads. It does nothing at all in a lot of workloads. For a few, really rare workloads,...

Yes, extended events is great for this if you're comfortable working with extended events and have the skills needed to programmatically process the extended events results data.  A lot...

I'd go with either Extended Events (much less overhead than Trace AND can be filtered on capture which Trace can't do) or Query Store. If you want to capture lots...

I don't understand what you're asking. You can make batch calls from code, almost exactly the same as calling procedures. You just change the command type. SSMS is also a...

Here's a code sample showing how C# calls a stored procedure. Compare that to 'EXEC dbo.MyProc' in SSMS. One is a remote procedure call. The other is a batch...

You can rebuild and reorganize columnstore indexes the same as rowstore. The reasons you do this are different though. It's not about fragmentation, because of how columnstore indexes are defined,...

1. if one stored procedures includes many pieces of SQL Statements and when the stored procedure is called , then The Reads of RPC:Completed includes all the reads of...

One huge note, I wouldn't recommend anyone "upgrade" a server to 2014 here in 2021. There are three other versions of SQL Server after 2014. All of them offer mechanisms...