Many of us have used the free version of Plan Explorer from SQLSentry for a long time to help tune and explore query plans in a way that SSMS can only dream of. Unlike most free tools this one still had plenty of useful features that served the community well. The Pro version did however contain a bunch of great features that many ...

The first big mistake I made as a DBA was coming to work with my zipper wide open. But I digress.Hear one of my most popular session via streaming media at SQLSentry.TV!Microsoft SQL Server is easier to administrate than any other relational database on the market.  But “easier than everyone else” doesn’t mean it’s easy.  And it doesn’t ...

I'm doing two new webcasts next week on Wednesday, December 19th, one in the morning and the other after lunch.   SSDs are a Game Changer for SQL Server Storage No, session is not exclusively about SSDs.  But this is my first session on IO and storage tuning that emphasizes SSDs over hard disks.  As Bob Dylan said ''Times, they ...

When you're developing new Transact-SQL code or modifying some existing code, do you just launch directly into programming? I know that I did just that, for years. It wasn't until I was trying to performance tune some existing code that I realized I hadn't actually taken caching of data and execution plans into account. So all those modified ...