It's an old story you've probably heard before.  Provide a free version of your software product with strict limitations on performance or other specific capabilities so that folks can give it a try without risk, while you minimize the chance of cannibalizing sales of your commercial products.  Microsoft has take this strategy ...

I'm doing two new webcasts next week on Wednesday, December 19th, one in the morning and the other after lunch.   SSDs are a Game Changer for SQL Server Storage No, session is not exclusively about SSDs.  But this is my first session on IO and storage tuning that emphasizes SSDs over hard disks.  As Bob Dylan said ''Times, they ...

Here's a quick tip for you:During some restore operations on Microsoft SQL Server, the transaction log redo step might be taking an unusually long time.  Depending somewhat on the version and edition of SQL Server you've installed, you may be able to increase performance by tinkering with the readahead performance for the redo operations. ...

The PerfMon Counters That Just Won't DieOne of the things that's simultaneously great and horrible about the Internet is that once something gets posted out in the ether, it basically never goes away.  (Some day, politicians will realize this.  We can easily fact check their consistency).  Because of longevity of content posted to ...

I had the honor of traveling the great state of Colorado last week, speaking at the PASS chapters in Boulder, Colorado Springs, and Denver.  At all three events, we had a stellar attendance and, at least in Denver, broke all the records in recent memory both in terms of overall attendance and in first-timers. ...

What's Going on at SQLServerPedia.com?Since the news broke that I was leaving Quest, I've gotten a lot of questions about the future of SQLServerPedia.com (SSP).  For those of you who don't know, SSP is a very popular community wiki and blog aggregator with nearly one hundred bloggers actively syndicating their content on the ...

I’ve been teaching my daughter about budgeting. I’ve explained that most of the time the money coming in is from only one or two sources – and you can only change that from time to time. The money going out, however, is to many locations, and it changes all the time. She’s made a simple debits and credits spreadsheet, and I’m having her research ...

I’m fascinated by the way people learn. I’m told there are several methods people use to understand new information, from reading to watching, from experiencing to exploring. Personally, I use multiple methods of learning when I encounter a new topic, usually starting with reading a bit about the concepts. I quickly want to put those into ...

Speaking at a recent SQL Saturday, an attendee in one of my sessions wanted to know how they could more flexibly react to locks on their application than to wait for blocks to occur and then kill the SPID at the head of the blocking chain.  They were also interested in some alternatives to using the  SQL Server syntax like the ...

This is a continuation of the books I challenged myself to read to help my career - one a month, for year. You can read my first book review here, and the entire list is here. The book I chose for April 2012 was: Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform. I was traveling at the end of last month so I’m a bit late posting this ...