The Try-N-Save SSIS Packages from my SSIS Dimensional Data Optimization presentation are available at http://cid-8f7e6c950afc6b3e.office.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/Presentation/TryNSave.zip. I'm still working on getting the sample database uploaded - even compressed a backup is larger than SkyDrive's upload filesize limit. I'll script it out when ...

It is with both sadness and excitement that I am announcing I am leaving my position as Senior Data Architect at OTO Labs. The sadness comes because I am leaving behind a great company and an outstanding team, many of whom I am quite happy to consider friends rather than co-workers.   This decision was not easy; I spent several days and ...

I had a discussion with a friend in Microsoft  IT this morning, and as we were evaluating some query plans we ran into more clustered index woes. Remember that clustered indexes affect the base table itself (which is why there can be only one) and are expensive to update. They are fantastic for reading data, but you need to carefully evaluate ...

While at the PASS Community Summit in November 2008, I had the pleasure of attending a handful of excellent presentations.  One of the best was delivered by Mike Ruthruff (& not just because he shilled for my presentation on disk partition alignment later that day—though I suspect he contributed to my session being SRO). Mike is a ...

In my previous post on filegroups, I tried to make the case that using filegroups (please everyone tell me you use other filegroups than PRIMARY...) can improve database performance. I received a number of comments challenging that notion, which personally I find wonderful - disagreement and real arguing ( no Monty Python  ''This isn't an ...

You have all seen websites where you can pick a bunch of categories by selection a bunch of check boxes. usually what you do is store those in a lookup table and then you create another table where you store all the categories for each customer. What if I tell you that you can store all that info in 1 row instead of 10 rows if a customer picked 10 ...