This will be a short post but nonetheless a very important one to me. A good friend of mine, Jason Strate (Blog | Twitter), posted a blog, "What are you thankful for?" In this post he asked all of his readers to also take a few moments and blog about…

Execution plan analysis is a critical aspect to keeping SQL Server running optimally. With any amount of hardware, the risk factor of a poorly written or unsupported statement being executed in a production environment has the ability to bring service availability to a halt. Testing on a futuristic sizing of tables and indexes is also a part of tuning that should be taken into account. Data will grow and, with that growth, queries will react differently if not tuned to their full potential.

PASS is quickly approaching. That means you have a very small amount of time to convince your manager, director, VP or whomever you call Boss, to send you to the largest annual SQL Server conference. If you do want to go and putting together a return of investment is not your strong point; PASS has taken into account that many a required to provide an ROI or some sort of documentation that says why the company should spend thousands of dollars for the trip. Since this is the case, the PASS website has an actual ROI page just to help you compose your own ROI.

SQLCop uses an internet connection to ensure that all checks and updates that are added are maintained. When SQLCop first loads, it checks the SQLCopConfig.xml file to determine if a new SQLCop.xml file needs to be downloaded. If SQLCop is unable to download the configuration file, it will automatically use the previously saved sqlcop.xml file. Because of this, a remote file request is always performed when you start up SQLCop.In order to work around this problem with proxy servers there is one of two things you can do to run SQLCop.

This post is long overdue but the last few months have been very busy. Busy in a great way though. That great way has been working on community and other things that we all know, I love to do.