A Failed Jobs Monitoring System
One DBA's tale of how to monitor jobs for failure and ensure that the DBA is alerted to the fact that there is a problem. (from Feb 2008)
Adding Slicers to a Reporting Services Report
This article shows you how to create dynamic slicers from a data set in an SSRS report
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.
Blogs
Upgrading SQL Server Containers on the Laptop
By Steve Jones
I don’t have SQL Server installed on my laptop. In an effort to keep...
How to Find Expensive Queries in Amazon Redshift
Slow-running queries can degrade your Redshift cluster’s performance and lead to increased costs. Identifying...
The Notification Trap: How Input Fatigue Is Killing Deep Work in Tech
By gbargsley
If you've been here before, you know this blog is usually about SQL Server,...
Forums
SQL 2019 instance with AG, across 2 Windows 2016 OS servers - OSin-place upgrade
Hi all Can I get some perspective from the community please on performing in-place...
How Long is a Long I/O?
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How Long is a Long...
T-SQL Trigonometric Functions in SQL Server
Comments posted to this topic are about the item T-SQL Trigonometric Functions in SQL...
Question of the Day
How Long is a Long I/O?
In SQL Server 2025, a long I/O is recorded in the error log with message 833. How long much an I/O request be outstanding before this message is written to the log?
See possible answers