DBA Morning Check List
This article helps the DBA find and fix issues quickly by creating a DBA Morning Checklist.
Execution Plans
How many of you use Execution Plans to tune your queries? Do you understand the impact of different indexes? Mr. Vijayakumar looks at his experiments with different types of indexes and their effects on the execution plan use. A great article for those of you that want to learn more about how you can tune your server for better performance.
Monitoring Drive and Database Free Space
SQL Server will autogrow your databases as they run out of space. But the process doesn't manage space, nor does it check the free space on the drive. Allowing autogrow to grow unchecked and unmanaged will eventually use up all the free disk space and potentially crash your server. New author Mark Nash brings you his system for monitoring space usage and generating a report that eases this process.
Performance Monitoring - Basic Counters
What counters should you monitor to baseline your servers? Which ones for checking performance? It's an interesting question and one that always leads Steve Jones to a wide range of sources in print and on the web. Steve compiled his own list and finally has put some words around the list to give some justification of why they are chosen. Read on and see how this compares to your list (you do have a list don't you?).
Preferred Node Policy-Setting on Traditional SQL Cluster
Preferred node setting facilitates instances on traditional cluster to be on the correct nodes which will lead to load-balancing of the resources.
Seven Monitoring Scripts
Joe has a bunch of small, easy to use scripts that can definitely be the beginning of a great set of monitoring tool. Amazing how much info you can gather with a little bit of code!
SQL Server Execution Plans, Second Edition by Grant Fritchey
Every Database Administrator, developer, report writer, and anyone else who writes T-SQL to access SQL Server data, must understand how to read and interpret execution plans. This book leads you right from the basics of capturing plans, through how to interrupt them in their various forms, graphical or XML, and then how to use the information you find there to diagnose the most common causes of poor query performance, and so optimize your SQL queries, and improve your indexing strategy.
SQL Server Performance Dashboard Reports
Setting up SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) based performance dashboard driven off servers that are registered through a Central Management Server (CMS).
The Effect of NOLOCK on Performance
Using hints in a query is something that most DBAs don't ever seem to bother with, but when they do, NOLOCK seems to be their hint of choice. Wayne Fillis brings us a detailed examination of how this particular hint actually affects the performance of your system.
Blogs
Webinar: Navigating the Database Landscape in 2026
By Steve Jones
For a number of years, we’ve produced the State of the Database Landscape report,...
Claude AI Convinced Me Not to Build an iPad App
By Steve Jones
I coach volleyball and I do a lot of stat stuff on paper. I...
A New Word: Dolorblindness
By Steve Jones
dolorblindness – n. the frustration that you’ll never be able to understand another person’s...
Forums
The Power of Data and Privacy
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What's the Date?
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Two New Shortcuts for Fabric Lakehouse Developers: The Fabric Modern Data Platform
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Two New Shortcuts for Fabric...
Question of the Day
What's the Date?
In SQL Server 2025, there is a new function that returns the current date without the time. What is it?
See possible answers