SQLAndy and the Idera ACE program

Excerpt posted by Andy Warren’s blog: Idera announced their ACE Program on Monday, a new effort to do more community outreach in a way a bit different than others have done it so far. Rather than the traditional evangelist/vendor rep model for participating in events, this program will have six members of the community that will be traveling to a lot of events on behalf of Idera. I’m excited about the p Read More

Understanding SQL Server Statistics

Donabel Santos (twitter (@sqlbelle) | blog) – April 25, 2011 “Statistics provides tools that you need in order to react intelligently to information you hear or read” – David Lane, 2003 If there’s an upcoming election and you are running for office and getting ready to go from town to town city to city with your flyers, you will want to know approximately how many flyers you’ Read More

CXPacket What?

By Mitch Bottel, April 19, 2011 Ever receive a late afternoon call just as you are unplugging your laptop to head home from an angry developer complaining about latency in his application trying to return data from your server? I know, I know, your first thought is “why did I answer that phone?” He claims that it is not his code and must be the database server. You hold your sarcastic comments, log into your se Read More

Ensure Proper SQL Server Connection Pooling

By: Michael K. Campbell, April 11, 2011 Coming to SQL Server from both a database developer and DBA background, I maintain that while tuning SQL Server’s ability to handle your application workloads is a viable way to increase performance, another way to bolster performance is to consider architectural and coding practices within your applications. This is especially true of connection pooling – which Microsoft Read More

Tips for Optimizing XML in SQL Server

Donabel Santos (twitter (@sqlbelle) | blog) – March 29, 2011 I’ve worked on a project that used XML heavily inside SQL Server. We really utilized SQL Server’s XML support almost to the full extent, but with some repercussions. As we did our load testing, performance did degrade and we had to step back and adjust how we were using our XML data. If you are using XML in your database, you may want to co Read More

Win a FREE Trip on the Alaska SQLCruise!

  Idera is giving away a free trip for two on the Alaska SQLcruise (including airfare)!  Here are the details on how you can win! SOLVED A BEASTLY PROBLEM THAT WAS PLAGUING YOUR SERVERS FOR DAYS, WEEKS OR MONTHS? DID ANYONE AROUND YOU REALIZE JUST HOW COOL AND AWESOME YOUR SOLUTION WAS? NOW’S YOUR CHANCE TO GET THE CREDIT YOU DESERVE! SHARE YOUR STORY OF SQL VICTORY AND HEAR FROM OTHERS WHO’VE VANQUISHED Read More

Quickly Validating SQL Server Configuration Settings

By Michael Campbell, March 14, 2011 Performance tuning tips come in many different shapes and sizes. Some represent technical ‘deep-dives’ into aspects of how SQL Server’s storage engine or query process tackles certain tasks – while others represent simple (or even complex) best practices for avoiding certain behaviors or problems. The key thing that all viable tuning tips share is that they’ll help you Read More