Again, I wanted to blog about something that still does not change between 2005 and 2008. At a recent conference, there were some great questions/ideas that should make it to Connect if they haven't already. When DB Snapshots were first introduced, one of the questions that I always heard was ''Can I perform a Backup on the ...

After spending the past couple of weeks at the MVP Summit in Seattle and at SQL Connections in Orlando, I thought I should blog about things that do not change in 2008 (at least partially). One of the reason s to partition your tables is to make it more managable.  Although there has been some enhancements in the manner that partitions are ...

The old Hardware Compatibility List which was renamed the ''Windows Catalog'' is no more.  When creating a Clustered Solution, you need to have a system that is Certified for clustering or there will be no official support.  This has been a point of pain in the past as organizations purchased a clustered solution and then one of the ...

When you start to look at SQL Server 2008, there is a sub-theme of using compression to help drive performance and usefulness.  When I hear the word compression, my first thought is ''No - I remember Stacker''.  How many years ago was that obscure reference?  Too many...  Stacker was a third party product for MS-DOS which ...

While I was reviewing one of the sessions from the PASS Community Summit using the streaming media on some new things in SQL Server 2008, I stumbled across a new reason to mirror.  The primary reason to mirror of course is availability and to give DBAs that warm fuzzy feeling that another up-to-date (or almost up-to-date if using Async mode) ...