You'd think an article called ''NASTY RUMORS ABOUT MAXDOP'' would have something to do with Britney Spears or maybe Robert Downy Jr, but in that case it'd be total fiction (at least, it would be coming from my pen).   So, I was en route to the 2008 Microsoft MVP Summit yesterday and I had a chance to catch up on my reading.  You ...

If you use computed columns a lot, you might want to know about some new behavior in SQL Server 2005. One of the changes in SQL Server 2005 was to evaluate expressions in queries to match computed column expressions and identify redundant expressions, in order to prevent run-time errors in queries that have unsafe expressions. This is documented ...

Italian SQL Server MVP Davide Mauri has released four very useful scripts that simplify the usage of SQL Server 2005 DMVs to discover, analyze, and understand index usage and health.  The queries are not rocket science, but they are long and rely on DMVs that you may not have learned about yet.  They also provide useful and ...

Sometimes, knowing which Dynamic Management View (DMV) to use is your biggest challenge when attempting to figure out SQL Server 2005 behavior.  For example, what if you want the cached execution plans in XML format, similar to the output of SET SHOWPLAN_XML?  As it turns out, Gert Draper pointed out that there are a couple of DMVs ...