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

Every now and then someone will ask how to return a list of all the identity values in a table that have been skipped. You will probably have a table with an identity column, the 'problem' with identity columns is that if an insert is rolled back or fails in any way then the identity value is not reused...you end up with gaps. Identifying gaps is pretty easy to do if you have a table of numbers in your database.

If you don't have a table of numbers, here is some code that will create a table with numbers between 1` and 2048

Yesterday we used the sys.dm_os_performance_counters dynamic management view in the post Find Out What Percent Of The Log Is Being Used For Each Database In SQL Server 2005 and 2008 to find out the log space used, today we will use this dynamic management view to find out if we are using any deprecated features.

So you have upgraded your old server to SQL Server 2008 and you wonder if you have any deprecated features in your code. Well, there is a que...

Sometimes you want to quickly see the percentage of log spaced that each database is using on your server. In SQL Server 2005 and 2008 you can use the sys.dm_os_performance_counters dynamic management view to find out this information. The query below will list all database and the percentage of log spaced used. The cntr_value column will have the percent of the log file that is being used and instance_name will be the database name.