This blog post describes how making the data flow buffers smaller might give a performance boost in some scenarios.

This is my contribution to T-SQL Tuesday #38: Standing Firm. I describe how I resolved an SSIS package performance issue.

This is day three of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts. Today we are going to look at sargable queries. You might ask yourself, what is this weird term sargable. Sargable comes from searchable argument, sometimes also referred as Search ARGument…

I noticed Brent Ozar worked on a SQL book titled: Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting. This book is now available and I decided to ask Brent some questions about this book. This interview was conducted by email, enjoy.

Denis: Is the book geared towards a beginner/intermediate level user or do you have to be an advanced user to really utilize the information in this book?

I li...

Not too many moons ago when I started out with SQL Server I was convinced that there was a memory leak inside SQL Server. I ran it locally and the RAM usage just keep growing and growing until my computer was so slow that I had to restart SQL Server. This fixed things for a while but after I ran some poorly written queries it would spike up again and stay high.

There are question about this in forums/fora/newgroups all the time, people think that the sqlserver.exe process has a gigantic memory leak. This is just not true, the reason SQL Server will use as much memory as it can possi...

sqtlrace is a stored procedure written by Lee Tudor (a.k.a Mr Tea.) The procedure takes an SQL batch as its first argument, sets up a trace filtered to include the current connection only, runs the batch, and summarises the trace information per statement in the batch. This can be a very handy tool to track down performance bottlenecks in a longer stored procedure, not the least if there are calls to nested procedures.

You can also use sqltrace to capture the query plans from a batch. This makes it possible to capture a single plan in a deep chain of nested stored p...

Take a look at this query.