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.