I've been looking at this new feature of SQL Server 2008 in order to demo it to customers, and I have to say it's pretty cool ! Along with Resource Governor and compression, it's one of my favourite new features and a good reason to consider an upgrade...

The release of SQL Server 2008 has hit another milestone with the news that Release Candidate 0 (RC0) has been made available for public download this morning. This was initially released to Technet Plus and MSDN subscribers last Friday. It is expected...

I've had one or two requests recently to set up the Performance Dashboard reports on SQL Server so I've created this blog post to step through the process. Firstly, the Performance Dashboard was created to allow customers and support engineers to monitor...

I attended a SQL Server User Group meeting earlier this year and heard a presentation about favourite DMV's. Mentioned in the discussion was sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats and that got me thinking about indexing strategies. I have been involved in performance...

The June SQL Server Technical Rollup Mail has now been released. Check it out for some great SQL Server information and resources... http://blogs.technet.com/trm/archive/2008/06/01/june-2008-technical-rollup-mail-sql.aspx

A great set of SQL Server automation tools has just been released by Microsoft onto the SQL Server Community Worldwide site... http://sqlcommunity.com/ScriptsTools/OpsDBOperationsDatabaseforSQLServer/tabid/275/language/en-US/Default.aspx These are...

Microsoft has launched the Sysinternals Live beta, allowing execution of Sysinternals tools directly from the web. Enter a tool’s Sysinternals Live path into Windows Explorer or a command prompt as \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\<toolname> or view...