I've had several posts about my DVDs, which I'm sure have aggravated Steve Dassin enormously.  Way back in June, I told you that I had to break off from my DVD producer and just this week, I finally received all the remaining DVDs. They showed up on my doorstep in 3 huge boxes. So what do I do with them? I will be trying to sell them ...

  Less than a week ago, I told you about making some major progress on my new book, and that it would ''soon'' be pre-orderable. It turns out it already was orderable, as my helpful readers let me know.  So here is the link to Amazon, for all of you who want to get the book as soon as it hits the streets! I just searched through my ...

I realize it's been a long time since I've posted, but I have been traveling quite a bit, and when not traveling I am writing. I have a firm deadline for the next book,and it means every available hour that I am not teaching will have to be spent writing. I just finished a major milestone, so I thought I would share that here.... I was dreading ...

It seems like questions always come up about how to monitor memory.  But each time the question comes up, it’s slightly different.   Here’s a sort of FAQ for memory questions:   1.  How can I figure out memory and CPU consumption by database? a.  In SQL Server 2005, DMVs are of course the way to go.  Pre-SQL ...

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 ...

Everytime a good product comes out, people seem to contrive bad ideas for what can be replaced, usually brains, or people with brains, or that people lacking brains can accomplish something on their own. Let me put it simply. Suppose one had a query that uses a nonclustered index, and required a key lookup, and the key lookup required a disk ...

An observant person has probably noticed that SQL queries requiring disk reads not only have longer duration but also higher CPU times. It is not hard then to deduce that disk access (for both HDD and SSD), which involves the OS performing an IO call, the SQL Server process finding a place in the buffer cache for the data pages, and possibly ...

Has any one encountered SQL backup failures that were ultimately diagnosed to a MemToLeave issue? This should only occur on 32-bit SQL Server versions, including 2000 and 2005. A number of other operations could generate a MemToLeave issue, but I am only addressing backup failures here. (the diagnosis should have led to messages in the SQL Logs ...

  Last December, I announced that my SQL Server Internals course was being made into a DVD series, and I then had several follow up posts over the next few months. I flew to NY 3 times, and have filmed 3 lessons. I was waiting to film the 4th, for which I already have the slides and the scripts, until the 2nd one was released, or at least ...

I asked for some names of people who you would like to see interviewed and Craig Freedman's name popped up a couple of times. I contacted Craig and he was kind enough to take time out from his busy schedule to answer these questions.  So, here are the questions. What are the most important things a person can do to master SQL ...