System RAM Comparison
Another link from Steve Jones, this page has a great breakdown of the different types of RAM.
White Paper - Select the Best Approach for Data Integration
This white paper was written by Alain Dumas, founder of Sunopis. Looks interesting. Looks like they sell a tool that does ETL, replication, data cleaning, and more. We haven't reviewed the product, just thought it was something that might be of interest to our readers
Getting Your Server Information
Do you use @@version? sp_server_info? What's the difference? Read on to see what each of these methods returns and which one you should be using.
Review of SQL 2000 Fast Answers
A monster book at 980 pages, it's written in 'how-to' format and has a ton of good material. Andy gave it the once over for us and reports back - see what he thinks!
Upcoming Event - Microsoft TechEd 2003 in Dallas
TechEd will have 350 sessions designed to suit the needs of developers, architects, IT professionals, database, network and system administrators, messaging and security specialists. Andy is going, if you're planning to attend post a comment or send him email (awarren@sqlservercentral.com)!
AWE Adventures
Joseph recently had to upgrade a server from 4g to 8g of memory. Read how he did it and learn about some interesting aspects of AWE. For example, if you have 6.5g configured for use by SQL, how will task manager show used by sqlserver.exe?
Building Communities with Software
Steve Jones found this link that has some great thoughts on how software should be used to help build a community. Read this if you have time and post some comments. One thing in particular we liked (read the article!) were the comments about emailing responses. Your comments on this one will help us plan as we continue to try to build a better site/community.
What's In A Review?
Expanding on the issue of reviewing software for SQL Server, Steve Jones proposes some standards for reviews in this article. Please take a moment to read and comment on this proposal to better help SQL Server Central.com provide you with the information that you need.
The SQL Server Black Box
Have you ever had the problem where a user ran a query against your SQL Serer and crashed it or made the server unusable since the CPU was spiked at 100%? A SQL Server black box is the equivalent of a flight data record. The black box records all queries being passed to your SQL Server and other useful information like errors.
Transaction Processing Performance Council
We've all seen the numbers published about how well very db vendors do on the TPC tests - have you ever visited the site that sponsors the tests? Or looked to see what hardware and software configuration was used to achieve the score? Lots of good information on this site!
Blogs
Shifting Mindsets: Why FinOps is Essential for Cloud Efficiency
By HeyMo0sh
As a DevOps practitioner, I’ve always focused on performance, scalability, and automation. But as...
March 2026 SQL Server Security Updates
By Brian Kelley
On Patch Tuesday, in addition to OS and Office security patches, Microsoft also released...
How Fabric Mirroring Transformed with SQL Server 2025
When mirroring was first released for Azure SQL Database, it used Change Data Capture...
Forums
Multiple Deployment Processes
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Multiple Deployment Processes
How to Use sqlpackage to Detect Schema Drift Between Azure SQL Databases
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How to Use sqlpackage to...
Upgrading Admin Queries
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Upgrading Admin Queries
Question of the Day
Upgrading Admin Queries
I have a query from a former DBA that we run on SQL Server 2025 to check on database metadata. This query references sys.sysaltfiles. I want to refactor this code to be more modern. Which DMV should I reference instead?
See possible answers