Sometimes you have to insert a bunch of data and you can't use BCP or another bulk load method. When you do single row inserts, SQL Server wraps these inserts inside an implicit transaction. Did you know that if you use an explicit transaction that the…

This is day twenty-one of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts. Today we are going to look at Very Large Databases

This is day fifteen of the SQL Advent 2012 series of blog posts. Today we are going to look at indexes

SQL Server has two data types to store character data, both of them come in fixed and variable length sizes. The char and varchar data type uses one byte of store to store one character, the nchar and nvarchar data type uses two bytes of store to store one character. The nchar and nvarchar data types are used to store unicode of data

SQL Server MVP Erland Sommarskog has posted his latest article yesterday and I highly recommend printing it out/transferring it to your ebook reader and reading it. Of course I think most of you are already familiar with Erland's article The curse and…

My first glance rating of SQL Monitor (1 to 5) is a solid 4. That is extremely high for me as I am hard on tools like this and the footprint they leave on my systems. As such, this monitoring tool as replaced my others and taken the spotlight as my primary tool to use. Cost + functionality + value make this a winner. The post on the footprint SQL Monitor leaves is the winning factor so look for it soon.

As I was working on a database yesterday I came across a curious sight, multiple columns defined as numeric(7,0), numeric(9,0), and so on. It seemed like someone was trying to provide the database with the most specific definition possible for a number of different pieces of data. Having never run into this particular practice, I immediately started searching for a reason. Was it smaller? faster? better?

There are hundreds if not thousands of T-SQL Scripts, Powershell Cmdlets, .NET programs and even old vbscript scripts and on out there to monitor SQL Server and Operating System level performance. I’ve written hundreds of them myself over the years. All of that time and work absolutely paid off. I know a lot about monitoring, going after the right information when something specific is wrong. It also gives me a bag of tricks that mostly causes laptops to run out of disk space often. Disk is cheap though, these days.

In the last post, "Baseline, Performance Reporting and being a proactive DBA" touched on baselines and using them to set thresholds for actively monitoring performance problems on SQL Server. From that post we briefly discussed that every database server is unique. That even being true when the databases we attach to SQL Server are packaged installations from third party applications (like SAP, Dynamics etc...). I received feedback from my good friend Aaron Lowe (Twitter | Blog) on this topic and a very good conversation on how we create these baselines. Aaron had a great point regarding t...

As database professionals, our intent is to be as proactive as possible when it comes to delivering data with security, stability and speed in mind. Being proactive means active monitoring, reporting performance variations and most important, baseline capture. Adding to these three objectives, we can add Performance Notes to also provide key points of long term and short term performance problems.

Let's take a minute to discuss the three key points (Baselines, Active Monitoring and Reporting Performance)