Random thoughts about SQL Server...

Dedicated Admin Connection (DAC) in SQL Server doesn’t need any introduction now that it is in the product for almost 6-7 years i.e from the days of SQL Server 2005. Starting from the early builds of SQL Server 2012, there is an error when connect...

Looking at wait types in SQL Server is a great way to get some insight into how SQL Server is operating under the current load. Although wait types in SQL Server are around from the days of SQL Server 2000 (may be earlier), it has improved significantly...

By this time everyone are aware that the next version of SQL Server i.e DENALI comes with ColumnStore Indexes which is a new concept in SQL Server. If you haven’t tried this feature yet then its about time to try it out on CTP3. I am pretty sure y...

Accessing remote data in SQL Server is inevitable sometimes and often people use linked servers for this task. Linked servers are a good option because they are easy to setup and the maintenance is relatively easy but they quickly realize the performanc...

Hi Javin,

Thanks for the complement and glad you liked it. Keep watching this space and there are few more good posts coming up soon. ...

Introduction In the past week this topic came up in 3 different occasions and it seems there is lot of confusion around this topic. In this post I will try to delve into some details and a demo to show that it’s NOT true. The confusion here is, the ope...

Introduction This question came up in a recent twitter conversation and Paul Randal clarified it at that time. I will make an attempt to attest to that theory as a supportive evidence using a demo. Most of the readers should already be familiar with t...

CHECKPOINT is one of the most misunderstood topic among developers as well as DBAs. One of the misconception is that CHECKPOINT writes only the committed data and that is NOT true. Paul Randal wrote about this topic extensively (here) and busted this my...

Introduction Everyone who works with Data warehouse data loads should be familiar with Minimal Logging. Minimal Logging helps tremendously in improving the performance of data loads as the amount of logging is reduced enormously by keeping track of onl...