The SQL Server support team just announced the release of a backup simulator. Many 3rd party utilities that do backup like IBM Tivoli, Symantec BackupExec, Quest Litespeed, Redgate SQL Backup etc. use the sqlvdi.dll to communicate to SQL Server and this allows you to simulate that activity. So if you want to test how your system reacts or more ...

Ola has a set of stored procedures to do maint operations, see http://ola.hallengren.com/. Ola has now updated them to support exclusions or inclusions of tables, indexes or even whole schemas from index rebuild/reorg. Check out http://ola.hallengren.com/Documentation.html#SelectingIndexes for info on how to define exclusions and ...

As many of you heard ( see Kevin’s post  http://sqlblog.com/blogs/kevin_kline/archive/2009/05/06/microsoft-marketing-throws-sql-server-under-the-bus.aspx ) MS marketing released a comment last week that indicated SQL Server couldn’t handle the load for the Win 7 downloads. But it appears that reality sets in and we get a much different story ...