If you've been around a while, you tend to do things the way you first learned how to do them.  This can turn you into an ''old timer'' whose oblivious to new and better ways to do things that have appeared in the newer releases of the technology.   Take measuring log space, for example.  If I wanted to find out how much log space ...

One of the best things about becoming a Microsoft MVP is meeting other MVPs.  I bring this up because last week was the annual MVP Summit in Seattle, WA.  I was really looking forward to meeting Steve Kass.  Steve Kass is one of the smartest SQL Server MVPs I’ve encountered, especially when it comes to SQL questions.  A ...

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 ...

A while back, Quest Software started a series of webcasts called ''The Pain of the Week''.  These webcasts are about a specific area of difficulty for SQL Server DBAs and developers, and how specific Quest tools can help. In the next webcast, I and my colleague from Quest, Bryan Oliver, will present a methodology and show you how to ...

Kevin here.  In the 2nd edition of my book ''SQL in a Nutshell'', I covered the latest ANSI SQL implementation, plus the full syntax and usage of the SQL commands for IBM's DB2 UDB, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.  You can imagine how much work that was.  I'm now starting to plan for the 3rd edition of the ...

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 ...

Gert Drapers, whom I consider to be a super-genius of the SQL Server world and owner of the very useful website http://www.sqldev.net, wrote a useful little script a few years ago that I thought I'd share.  This is a SQL query that will show who and what is causing the log of a database, in this case tempdb, to grow: USE tempdbGO SELECT ...

  Here's a tip that comes by way of MVPs Dr. Tom Moreau (no, not that Dr. Moreau) and Tibor Karaszi (http://www.karaszi.com/sqlserver/default.asp).You probably know that you can backup a database and add WITH STATS = ... to get the running percentage progress of the backup. Have you ever wondered if there's a DMV that captures ...