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 compatibility level of 110 (SQL Server 2012), but when run under compatibility level of 120 (SQL Server 2014), th...

A law firm client, occasionally has issues with their legal software, that is provided by the global leader in this field. The response from the software provider is always the same - you have index fragmentation. This is not a great response from a...

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 from. They also knew that deleting large amounts of data causes the transaction log to grow.

Doesn’t matter wha...

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

To understand how the default is calculated see the follo...

One of the difficulties in dealing with deadlocks is actually knowing that they occurred and then getting information. Even if you have enable the right trace flags, you are only part of the way there. The 1205 deadlock message is not logged and this...

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

This can be a common problem with your VM configuration assigning the vCPUs as sockets instead of cores.

This is only applicable in S...

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

Check the power options on your SQL Servers (Control Panel -> Power Options) to make sure it is set to h...

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 on (-T1222) and then you would need to read through the SQL Server error log and try to piece together all the n...

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 have created in the registered servers, but the output is then just one large chunk and I prefer looking at the r...

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

This was because mail was being handled through Office 365.

Firstly the server needs to...