What's a Passive Server?
Today Steve Jones talks about licensing and the complexity if brings in various scenarios. Do your passive servers have to be licensed? What is the definition of "passive"?
7 Things that High Availability is Not
Wesley has heard High Availablity touted as all sorts of technological cure-all for busy SysAdmins and DBAs, and now he's taking a stand against it. There are a range of things that High Availability is regularly confused with (either deliberately or innocently), and Wesley's clearing it all up
A Great Deal of Hot Air
Even though neither the science nor politics of climate change is fully established yet, the legislators and bureaucrats have smelt an opportunity to further tighten their grip on IT. A sign of things to come is the EU’s Code of Conduct for Data Centers on Energy Efficiency.
It's Almost Always the Humans
Today we have a reprint of an editorial from Sept 19, 2005 as Steve Jones is on vacation. In this one, Steve Jones reminds companies that saving money sometimes on Customer Service isn't as easy as you think.
Which of Your Stored Procedures are Using the Most Resources?
Dynamic Management Views and Functions aren't always easy to understand. However, they are the easiest way of finding out which of your stored procedures are using up the most resources. Greg takes the time to explain how and why these DMVs and DMFs get their information. Suddenly, it all gets clearer.
How To Get Table Row Counts Quickly And Painlessly
Use sysindexes\DMVs insead of select count(*) to retreive table row counts
31 Days of SSIS – Generating Row Numbers (23/31)
31 Days of SSIS
It’s Sunday afternoon and a good time to be putting up post twenty-three for the 31 Days...
Internals and Performance class in Dallas
At last, my blog is starting to pay real dividends. Not only do I get the opportunity to publish my...
Showplan Operator of the Week - Merge Interval
When Fabiano agreed to undertake the epic task of describing each showplan operator, none of us quite predicted the interesting ways that the series helps to understand how the query optimizer works. With the Merge Interval, Fabiano comes up with some insights about the way that the Query optimizer handles overlapping ranges efficiently.
Blogs
ISACA AI Material/Exam Prep Discount (May 18 – June 30, 2026)
By Brian Kelley
If you are considering any of the ISACA AI certs like the Advanced Artificial...
A Fabric solution can be very cost effective
By ChrisJenkins
Are you currently using Microsoft Fabric or considering migrating to it? If so, there...
Track SQL Server Configuration Changes Using the Error Log
By SQLPals
Track SQL Server Configuration Changes Using the Error Log If you...
Forums
We Are Eating Our Own Seed Corn
Comments posted to this topic are about the item We Are Eating Our Own...
Before Using AI with Business Data, Read This
Artificial intelligence tools are quickly becoming part of daily business operations, from document analysis...
Designing SQL Server ETL Pipelines That Don't Break at Scale
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Designing SQL Server ETL Pipelines...
Question of the Day
Detecting Deadlocks Quickly
In the Database Engine, when a deadlock is detected, what does the detection interval shrink to (in time)?
See possible answers