I had a great time speaking with the large communities of SQL Server users as I traveled about Europe last week and much of this week.  I'm always impressed by the skill, intelligence, and creativity of these professionals. And sometimes they raise questions that I think are worth sharing with everyone because they too might've heard the ...

I find that auto_update statistics in SQL Server is a really good thing.  Without it, many third-party applications would simply fall over from lack of preventative maintenance.  With it, they are able to run for extraordinarily long periods of time without really needing a full-time DBA to check up on the databases.   Having said ...

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 ...

I was recently trying to diagnose some problems in one of my SQL Servers when I ran across a problem that I hadn't encountered before involving 'nonyielding worker threads'.  SQL Server also produced a dump for me to review.  Unfortunately, the dump didn't make a lot of sense to me.    If you encounter one of SQL Server's ...

MVP Hugo Kornelius once reported that he encountered a situation in which it was possible to perform a table scan on more pages than actually existed in the heap table.  Hugo deduced that this was due to a phenomenon called “forwarding pointers”.    Why in the world would this ever happen?  Real Paul Randall’s excellent blog ...

You might have noticed, if you’re a heavy user of PerfMon, that some counters are exhibiting alterations in behavior between SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005.  For example, I’ve long used the “Transactions/sec” counter to get an idea of how much work a SQL Server is accomplishing.  Now, in SQL Server 2005, certain internal system ...

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 ...

Just a quick note to send a big Thank You to Christoph Stotz of Frankfurt, Germany for his hospitality on Sunday.  Thank you, Christoph!  Slava Oks has a rather well-known blog entry about how hyperthreading can negatively impact the performance of a SQL Server 2000 instance: ...