The SQL Nexus set of utilities are some of the most under utilized tools available to the SQL Server community. I used and touted the RML utility for many years to help people analyze trace information very fast and easily. Eventually XE traces were added to the list along with much more.  This blog post link will give you a pretty ...

From Red-Gate website you can download (for free) the ebook SQL Server Hardware written by Glenn Berry (@GlennAlanBerry). This ebook will provide the fundamental knowledge and resources you need to make intelligent decisions about choice, and optimal installation and configuration, of SQL Server hardware, operating system and the SQL Server ...

Preamble This is the second in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in my big deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an ...

Preamble This is the first in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in this deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume ...

          Please note that I have a newer version of these procedures that you can find herehttp://sqlblog.com/blogs/andrew_kelly/archive/2015/09/02/revised-file-wait-statistics-procedures.aspx .  For many years I have been using a set of stored procedures to capture and report on both ...

The Try-N-Save SSIS Packages from my SSIS Dimensional Data Optimization presentation are available at http://cid-8f7e6c950afc6b3e.office.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/Presentation/TryNSave.zip. I'm still working on getting the sample database uploaded - even compressed a backup is larger than SkyDrive's upload filesize limit. I'll script it out when ...

It is with both sadness and excitement that I am announcing I am leaving my position as Senior Data Architect at OTO Labs. The sadness comes because I am leaving behind a great company and an outstanding team, many of whom I am quite happy to consider friends rather than co-workers.   This decision was not easy; I spent several days and ...

I had a discussion with a friend in Microsoft  IT this morning, and as we were evaluating some query plans we ran into more clustered index woes. Remember that clustered indexes affect the base table itself (which is why there can be only one) and are expensive to update. They are fantastic for reading data, but you need to carefully evaluate ...

While at the PASS Community Summit in November 2008, I had the pleasure of attending a handful of excellent presentations.  One of the best was delivered by Mike Ruthruff (& not just because he shilled for my presentation on disk partition alignment later that day—though I suspect he contributed to my session being SRO). Mike is a ...

In my previous post on filegroups, I tried to make the case that using filegroups (please everyone tell me you use other filegroups than PRIMARY...) can improve database performance. I received a number of comments challenging that notion, which personally I find wonderful - disagreement and real arguing ( no Monty Python  ''This isn't an ...