In order to figure out if you need more memory for a SQL Server you can start by taking a look at Buffer cache hit ratio and Page life expectancy.

Buffer cache hit ratio

Here is what Books On Line has to say about Buffer cache hit ratio

Buffer cache hit ratio

Percentage of pages found in the buffer cache without having to read from disk. The ratio is the total number of cache hits divided by the total number of cache lookups over the last few thousand page accesses. After a long period of time, the ratio moves very little. Because reading from the cache is m...

This question popped in the microsoft.public.sqlserver.programming forum yesterday. A person wanted to change a column from varchar 500 to varchar 2000. This is actually pretty easy to do in SQL Server, you can use the alter table alter column command

Let's take a quick look at how this works

First create this table

Best Practice: coding SQL Server triggers for multi-row operations

There are many forum posts where people code triggers but these triggers are coded incorrectly because they don't account for multi-row operations. A trigger fires per batch not per row, if you are lucky you will get an error...if you are not lucky you will not get an error but it might take a while before you notice that you are missing a whole bunch of data

Let's take a look, first create these two tables

The CSS SQL Server Engineers have posted an interesting post, I myself don't have any of the fake identity columns but I did many times suggest in newsgroups to use UPDLOCK and HOLDLOCK in a transaction to guarantee that 2 inserts would not generate the same key value. This stuff below is from the CSS SQL Server Engineers post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2009/10/26/reduce-locking-and-other-needs-when-updating-data-better-performance.aspx

This was asked on twitter recently and I gave the answer there. I decided to write a blog post about this because I can use over 140 charaters here instead.

You will see the Cannot resolve collation conflict for equal to operation error when you try to join 2 tables. let's take a look at what we need to do to resolve this. First create and populate these two tables