Replication and Database Mirroring

Gopal Ashok and Paul Randal's Whitepaper titled "SQL Server Replication: Providing High Availability using Database Mirroring" has been released. A great read, with some heavy hitting Technical Reviewers! ... Source : SQLCat.com - Whitepaper

Analysis Services, Memory Pre-Allocation and Windows Server 2008

The SQLCat team discuss the benefits of memory pre-allocation and Windows Server 2008 for Analysis Services Implementations ... Source : SQLCat.com - Technical Note

System Health XEvent

SQL Server 2008 introduces a new event handling system called Extended Events, or Xevents. In this post, Bob Ward talks about an "always on" event called System Health that, among other things, enables details of events such as deadlocks, non yielding problems and severity 20 errors to be captured. Best of all, recent events it captures can be inspected at any later time using a new DMV. This is yet another example of how XEvents will make troubleshooting prickly problems so much easier ... Source : Bob Ward - PSS SQL Server Engineers - Blog Post

Sample DMV Queries

A good collection of DMV Scripts covering Blocking, Disk IO, Memory, Indexes and more …. ... Source : SQL Server Premier Field Engineers - SQLBlogcasts.com - Blog Post

Foreign Keys without an Index

A common performance problem stems from unindexed Foreign Keys. In addressing this, Paul Nielsen wrote (and kindly published the code for) a script to create composite non clustered indexes on foreign keys without a matching index. Thanks Paul! ... Source : Paul Nielsen - SQLBlog.com

Resource Governor

Arguably one of the most significant new features in 2008, Resource Governor brings with it a fair amount of confusion. In this post, Bob Dorr addresses some of the common misunderstandings, including why a process can exceed its maximum CPU usage ... Source : Bob Dorr - PSS SQL Server Engineers - Blog Post

Standard Reports

One of the great things about SQL Server 2005 was the inclusion of a large range of Standard Reports, with SQL Server 2008 expanding on this further. In this post, Buck Woody lists, describes and categorizes all of them ... Source : Buck Woody - MSDN.com - Blog Post

Data Modelling

The "Art or Science" club grows by the day. Hugo discusses the latest member … Data Modelling ... Source : Hugo Kornelis - SQLblog.com - Blog Post

Oracle to SQL Server Data Migration

The SQLCat team reveal the various methods and corresponding results of moving 200GB of data from a Unix based Oracle 9i system to SQL Server 2005 with a 2 hour duration target ... Source : SQLCat.com - Technical Note

SET NOEXEC

A nice tip from Denis on using SET NOEXEC to determine if a script references invalid object names without actually running it ... Source : Denis Gobo - SQLBlog.com

Autonomous Transactions

Some nice tips from the ISV team on preserving the state of a committed inner transaction when the outer transaction rolls back ... Source : Microsoft SQL ISV Program Management Team - Blog Post

SQL Server Version Summary

A great resource from aspfaq.com summarizing the various SQL Server and Analysis Services versions, service packs and hotfixes ... Source : aspfaq.com

To MAXDOP or not to MAXDOP

… that is the question. Two of my favorite bloggers (Linchi Shea and Joe Chang) compare notes on query performance with various MAXDOP settings ... Source : Linchi Shea - SQLBlog.com