Excellence in SQL Server

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...

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 issue.

This made it very hard to run any programs. Luckily I knew the location of SQL Server Management Studio (ss...

A hosting company called me to investigate an issue with their SQL Servers instances, one client was having issues with the application whilst another client using the same application on another instance with more active users had no problems. The q...

I was asked to look at a SQL Server by a business software solution company. Performance issues. I did a current system state assessment and found that there were no backups or maintenance occurring. This seems to be a common and consistent problem,...