Today was a very sad day for me. I received news that a dear friend, Rose Waters @SQLRose, whom I had the pleasure of working with, passed away yesterday. Rose was an all-around great and very intelligent, hard working person. Her energy in wanting to l…

SQL Server baseline collection is an important task that is too frequently overlooked.  Collecting information on how SQL Server is both providing data services and reacting to how those data services are being utilized, creates a foundation for efficie…

Missing index suggestion – Duplicate Index The missing index feature while tuning or checking estimated and actual plans is very helpful.  Something that is key in that sentence is the word, helpful.  Don’t run out and simply create all of them.  Make…

If you are dealing with SQL Azure and a large data volume, you’re bound to run into this error. Msg 40552, Level 20, State 1, Line 1 The session has been terminated because of excessive transaction log space usage. Try modifying fewer rows in a singl…

When working on SQL Server that is stretching IO and the subsystem to its limits, you are bound to see a buffer latch time-out error at some point. This is typically, "Time-out occurred while waiting for buffer latch type 2 or 3". If you do, it will us…

I’ve had the chance to talk to quite a few people over the last few months about my experiences with Windows 8.  So far, and I can’t see it changing, I’ve been very impressed with Windows 8 and the efficiency boost it has provided me in normal, day-to-d…

This month’s T-SQL Tuesday topic is all about speaking.  Before getting into the topic, I’d like to thank Bob (Captain Bob as I’ve now seen his license plate) for hosting this month.  T-SQL Tuesday is a great idea, started by Adam Machanic.  It provides…

April 6th starts a week of plenty of great SQL Server content.  Much of which is being handed over to all that attend for free in the form of SQL Saturdays.  If you are near the Chicago, IL, Madison, WI areas, make sure you take advantage of the followi…

Loading data into SQL Databases (Azure) is fairly simple.  With SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), the task becomes even more trivial as with many ETL tasks that we’ve done in the past from data source to data source.  Truly speaking, a data source…

If you’ve read my past blogs, you’ll know that I believe SQL Sentry Plan Explorer is absolutely a must for assisting in execution plan review, tuning and troubleshooting.  Recently, SQL Sentry went to the next level with the services offered in Plan Exp…