The sys.dm_exec_query_stats view is one of my favorite DMVs. It has replaced a large chunk of what I used to use SQL Trace for--pulling metrics about what queries are running and how often--and it makes this kind of data collection painless and automatic. What's not to love? But use cases for the view are a topic for another post. Today I want to ...

 UPDATE, April 28 2011: Who is Active v9.57 is outdated. Please use v11.00 instead.     Happy December, SQLblog readers! My gift to you, just in time for the holidays: The newest ''official'' release of your favorite SQL Server activity monitoring stored procedure.   Click here to download Who is Active? ...

INSERT and EXEC: relational brothers in arms, helping you get your data and then put it somewhere. But like all brothers, their relationship has its ups and downs and sometimes you need to look just below the surface to see the real issues. In this post I will cover hidden penalties that a decision--seemingly purely aesthetic--can bring to ...

Last year on December 31 I posted part of a larger monitoring script that I had been working on for a few months. I received lots of great feedback on the little script in both the comments and from people I was working with, and over the course of the last year I estimate that I have invested at least a couple of hundred hours in the script. The ...