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 ...

It's always a feel-good experience for me to return to SQL Saturday in Orlando, the place where SQL Saturdays  were started by Andy Warren (Twitter | Blog).  On this trip, I delivered a full-day, pre-conference seminar on Troubleshooting and Performance Tuning SQL Server.  I also delivered a session on SQL Server ...

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. ...

In foreground, attendee makes dreaded ''shoot myself'' hand sign to the speaker.I was just telling the good people of Charlotte about how they (and how YOU) need to read all things by Paul Randal (blog | twitter), except for all of his cheesy romance novels like Caress and Conquer written under the nom de plum of ...

How often do you do this? Look over each message (type) in the errorlog file and determine whether this is something you want to act on. Sure, some (but not all) of you have some monitoring solution in place, but are you 100% confident that it really will notify for all messages that you might find interesting? That there isn't even one little ...

SQL Server comes with a wide array of tools for monitoring your environment. There are logs and traces that provide information when errors occur, but these are often used passively to react to events that have already occurred.  There's PerfMon, and Profiler, and loads of Dynamic Management Views to check.  But where to look? As ...

One last reminder -  If you're interested in learning more about troubleshooting and optimizing SQL Server performance, please consider coming to the full-day seminar I'll be giving this Friday.  Full details are here: http://sqlperftuning.eventbrite.com/.  We'll be working some exercises, so bring your laptop with an instance ...

When you're developing new Transact-SQL code or modifying some existing code, do you just launch directly into programming? I know that I did just that, for years. It wasn't until I was trying to performance tune some existing code that I realized I hadn't actually taken caching of data and execution plans into account. So all those modified ...

I’d recently experienced a situation where I was getting repeated login failures to a SQL Server where I knew that I had the correct user name and password.  Each time, I’d get error 18456 in response. ''Login failed for user '<user_name>'. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 18456)''. The challenge when troubleshooting ...

Yep, another Agent blog. The topic of job owner has been discussed here before, but this is a specific situation, which potentially is a ticking bomb. First a quick recap of how agent does things: When a job is owned by somebody who is sysadmin, then no impersonation is performed. T-SQL jobsteps will be executed as Agent's own Windows ...