2012 was, simply stated, a year that kicked my butt.  When I wasn't struggling professionally, I was struggling personally.  Health issues, culminating in a diagnosis of Type II diabetes, and the passing of my father soon after Thanksgiving marked my biggest struggles.  I apologize to those of you who are normally on my Christmas ...

I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Cephas Lin, of Microsoft, last year at the SQL Saturday in Indianapolis and then later at the PASS Summit in the fall.Cephas has been writing content for SQL Server 2012 Always On. Cephas has recently published his first whitepaper, a migration guide to SQL Server AlwaysOn. Read it and then pass along ...

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 ...

In case you are not aware, the excellent white paper “Statistics Used by the Query Optimizer in SQL Server” has been updated for SQL Server 2008.   You can find it here   Statistics Used by the Query Optimizer in SQL Server 2008 Writer: Eric N. Hanson and Yavor Angelov Contributor: Lubor ...