This post is part of the monthly community event called T-SQL Tuesday started by Adam Machanic (blog|twitter) and hosted by someone else each month. This month the host is Sankar Reddy (blog|twitter) and the topic is Misconceptions in SQL Server. You can follow posts for this theme on Twitter by looking at #TSQL2sDay hashtag. Next to SQL Server ...

Robert Davis(blog/twitter) recently blogged The Toilet Analogy … or Why I Never Recommend Increasing Worker Threads, in which he uses an analogy for why increasing the value for the ‘max worker threads’ sp_configure option can be bad inside of SQL Server.  While I can’t make an argument against Robert’s assertion that increasing worker ...

This is the first post in a what will be a series of posts on working with a sub-optimal disk configuration to squeeze as much performance out of it as possible.  You might ask what a Sub-Optimal Disk Configuration?  In this case it is a Dell Powervault MD3000 with 15 Seagate Barracuda ES.2 SAS 1 TB 7.2K RPM disks (Model Number ...

The other night I was asked on Twitter by Todd McDonald (Twitter), for a build list for SQL Server 2005 and 2008.  My initial response was to provide a link to the SQL Server Build List Blog, which documents all of the builds of SQL Server and provides links to the KB articles associated with the builds.  However, this wasn’t what Todd ...

One of the standard configuration options that I set on all SQL Server installs is to log Failed Login Attempts to the SQL Server Error Log.  I recently inherited an environment that this option wasn’t standardized across all of the servers and needed to configure it for multiple servers in a scripted manner.  There are a couple of ways ...

Paul Randal recently blogged about Using diskpart and wmic to check disk partition alignment.  Lately, I have been writing A LOT of Powershell scripts at my new job, primarily because the size of the environment makes it next to impossible to work through all of the servers one at a time, so automating the work with Powershell has made things ...

Over a year ago I first read about disk and partition alignment on the blog of Jimmy May (blog/twitter).  I always wanted to look into this further, but there was always a major hurdle to doing this in my environment, almost every one of my production servers is a VM, and the storage for them comes from our enterprise SAN.  The ...

This week I have been pretty heads down working with a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer learning how to best customize System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 to monitor things not included in the SQL Server Management Pack.  Based on the training I have received, I spent tonight working on a series of monitors to check that backups have ...

During the 24 hours of PASS we (Thomas LaRock (Blog/Twitter), Argenis Fernandez(Blog/Twitter) and myself) got into a discussion about enabling Jumbo Frames (network packets over 1500 bytes, generally set to 9000 bytes) for use with SQL Server.  I was surprised that most people on Tom's session and then later again on Twitter hadn't heard ...