Here is a SQL Server challenge as I have failed so far:   Describe a reproducible workload that would see significant throughput improvement when trace flag 1118 is enabled.   I have seen a lot of chatters, anecdotes, and stories on the impact of trace flag 1118 on reducing tempdb contentions. But I have not seen ...

After much feedback from customers (and some loud feedback from MVPs, led primarily by Maciej Pilecki), Microsoft's Bob Ward just announced at the European PASS Conference that they are going to allow the 'lock pages in memory' privilege for all the lowly peons running Standard Edition.  Currently this has only been allowed on Enterprise ...