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 ...

I first wrote about useful database maintenance scripts on my SQLBlog account way back in 2008. Hmmm - now that I think about it, I first wrote about my own useful database maintenance scripts in a journal called SQL Server Professional back in the mid-1990's on SQL Server v6.5 or some such. But I digress... Anyway, I pointed out a couple ...

Lucy, You Got Some 'Splainin to Do!' Quest Software's latest community initiative, Windows Azure-based Project Lucy, has debuted! Project Lucy is part infrastructure analytics, part social media experiment, and part performance data warehouse. The best things about Project Lucy include: It’s Free - just like our SQLServerPedia ...

There were discussions on disk misalignment on this site. See my previous post on “Performance Impact of Disk Misalignment”, and Kevin Kline’s blog on “How to Improve Application and Database Performance up to 40% in One Easy Step”   But thanks to Jimmy May's PASS 2008 presentation on the I/O performance impact of disk partition ...