Understanding and Using Powershell Support in SQL Server 2008

In this article, Allen covers both an introduction to Powershell, and how we can use it to our advantage in administering SQL Server ... Source : Allen White - Technical Article - MSDN.com

Multi-Terabyte Database Backups over the Network

This document discusses the challenges of designing a robust backup and restore solutions for very large databases (VLDBs). Using a real-world example, it demonstrates how to make the best use of the backup and restore features of SQL Server 2008 to help create a fast and reliable backup and restore plan for VLDBs over the network ... Source : Thomas H. Grohser - Case Study - SQLCAT.com

Best Practices for Data Warehousing with SQL Server 2008

As the title suggests, this article presents "accumulated wisdom" from Data Warehousing projects and covers initial design, partitioning, data profiling, business sponsorship and a whole lot more ... Source : Mark Whitehorn - Technical Article - MSDN.com

Assigning surrogate keys to early arriving facts using SSIS

In this post, the SQLCAT team demonstrate an SSIS technique for handling early arriving facts ... Source : SQLCat.com - Blog Post

SQL Server 2008 Failover Clustering

A great companion whitepaper to the SQL Server Books Online failover clustering documentation ... Source : Whitepaper - SQLCAT.com

MemToLeave and 64bit

Bob Ward talks about one of the benefits of 64bit SQL Server - the absence of "MemToLeave" issues ... Source : Bob Ward - CSS SQL Server Engineers - Blog Post

Resource_semaphore_query_compile

It looks like Jason and I have shared the same nightmare. In this post, he explores the possible causes of the infamous Resource_Semaphore_Query_Compile error ... Source : Jason Massie - jasonmassie.com

Data Compression: Strategy, Capacity Planning and Best Practices

While the new data compression feature in SQL Server 2008 delivers obvious benefits, there's a number of considerations before implementation, most notably the CPU impact. This article covers both the benefits and impacts of compression by different workload types ... Source : Sanjay Mishra - Technical Article - MSDN.com

DBCC Checks and Terabyte-Scale Databases

This document covers some of the options available to reduce the impact of running DBCC checks on VLDBs. ... Source : Stuart Ozer - Technical Note - SQLCAT.com

MERGE and OUTPUT

Adam explores the various uses for the MERGE command, including the power of its OUTPUT clause ... Source : Adam Machanic - SQLBlog.com

Can NOLOCK block inserts?

Yes, and Linchi demonstrates how this can occur ... Source : Linchi Shea - SQLBlog.com

Calculating the third Wednesday of the month

Alexander provides a (fast) solution to problems such as this using inline UDFs ... Source : Alexander Kuznetsov - SQLBlog.com

Un-named Defaults

In this post, Andrew covers several reasons why it's important to give default constraints a name ... Source : Andrew Kelly - SQLBlog.com

Grouped String Concatenation

Adam announces the results of his "Grouped String Concatenation" challenge ... Source : Adam Machanic - SQLBlog.com

TRY, CATCH, FAIL

In some (rare) cases, the CATCH block of a TRY-CATCH statement may fail to fire. In this post, Alexander walks us through one such example ... Source : Alexander Kuznetsov - SQLBlog.com

Statistics Used by the Query Optimizer in Microsoft SQL Server 2008

This papers covers the inner workings of statistics, and the vital role they play in achieving the best query performance in SQL Server. In addition to a broad overview, it covers how SQL Server automatically maintains statistics, and how these settings can be overridden for individual columns/tables/databases (and why you may want to consider doing so) ... Source : Eric N. Hanson and Yavor Angelov - Whitepaper - MSDN.com

Plan Caching in SQL Server 2008

In this paper, Greg explains the inner workings of plan caching in SQL Server 2008, including best practices for reducing recompilations and plan cache pollution ... Source : Greg Low - Technical Article - MSDN.com

Using the Resource Governor

This paper covers the new Resource Governor feature introduced in SQL Server 2008, including ways of using it for server consolidation, preventing runaway queries, meeting service level agreements and implementing a resource usage based charging system ... Source : Whitepaper - MSDN.com

High Availability and Disaster Recovery: A SQL Server 2008 Technical Case Study

A case study of how ServiceU Corporation achieved 99.99% uptime using SQL Server 2008 ... Source : David P. Smith - Whitepaper - SQLCAT.com

Free SQL Server tools

Mladen provides links to a number of cool (and free) SQL Server tools ... Source : SQLTeam.com

SQL Server 2008 Diagnostic Script

Glenn kindly provides access to a number of diagnostic scripts for SQL Server 2008 ... Source : Glen Berry - spaces.live.com

Disk Partition Alignment Best Practices for SQL Server

Covering both the historical background information surrounding partition alignment and the negative performance impact unaligned partitions can have, this paper is essential reading for anyone involved in storage configuration for SQL Server systems. It provides actual results that demonstrate the performance impact of unaligned partitions, and includes a discussion of how Windows Server 2008 deals with this situation ... Source : Jimmy May and Denny Lee - Best Practices Article - Microsoft.com

SAN Multipathing

Brent walks us through the benefits and considerations for using SAN Multipathing ... Source : brentozar.com - Blog Post