Excellence in SQL Server

Recently I was asked by a software vendor to review a particular query that ran in under a second on a SQL Server 2014 installation at a ...

A law firm client, occasionally has issues with their legal software, that is provided by the global leader in this field. The response f...

I had a client call me about wanting to delete a large amount of data from their database. They knew what tables they wanted to delete fr...

DBA's and developers know the importance of having up to date statistics to ensure that query performance is optimal. Most of the time th...

One of the difficulties in dealing with deadlocks is actually knowing that they occurred and then getting information. Even if you have e...

Whilst working with a number of SQL Server Standard edition installations I noticed that some schedulers were offline. This can be a comm...

Although not part of your SQL Server install or configuration, the windows power setting can have an impact on the performance of your SQ...

One of the problems with dealing with deadlocks is first of all you have to be able to capture them and have the right trace flags turned...

I have a query that I run against a number of servers when doing weekly checks. Now I could run a single query against the local group I ...

Whilst setting up a server, we had to configure database mail. Usually a straight forward exercise but it ended up being a lot more troub...

I was RDP'ing to a Windows 2016 server and when I got onto the server, the start menu and search windows didn't work. Supposedly a known ...

A hosting company called me to investigate an issue with their SQL Servers instances, one client was having issues with the application w...

I was asked to look at a SQL Server by a business software solution company. Performance issues. I did a current system state assessment ...

I got an alert recently from a Severity 016 error on a production system that I monitor. The error message was: "The query processor ran ...

Whilst investigating performance issues on a SQL Server 2017 instance, I had made some recommendations to hopefully alleviate the issue. ...

I have blogged previously about what a great tool sp_whoisactive is from Adam Machanic. Sometimes you may need it to be run regularly to ...

I was asked to assist in changing the tempdb configuration on a SQL Server to use multiple files and to shrink the size down from a singl...

Whilst doing a current system state assessment for a client of their SQL Server fleet, I found a number of production SQL Servers without...

With a lot of databases being moved to the cloud, you need to think about the cost of storage. With differing tiers being available with ...

One of the good things about working with SQL Server is that you are constantly learning. It wasn't until very recently that I learnt abo...