Thanks to all who attended the SSUG meeting in Edinburgh last night. I've included my slides and demo scripts in the attached file (SSUG_190810_ExecutionPlans.zip). I've also included some additional references relating to discussions we had during the course of the evening. If you need any other information...

The next Scottish SQL Server User Group meeting will take place on Thursday 19th August at the Microsoft offices in Edinburgh. I'll be talking about SQL Server execution plans and how to use them to identify issues in your application code and Martin will be educating us all with his knowledge of Extended...

I recently came across some issues running perfmon on Windows Server 2003 where the OS is 64-bit and SQL Server is 32-bit (Wow64). The SQL Performance counters were not appearing as the default Perfmon is 64-bit, which is unable to read the 32-bit SQL counters. Running the 32-bit version of Perfmon allows...

I am very happy to announce that I've been chosen as a speaker for the SQLBits VI conference in London on the 16th April. The theme for this conference is performance and scalability and I'll be talking about some of the new features in SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 in this area. There is a great...

I’ve been fairly quiet on the blogging-front recently, but I have been busy working with SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) ! I've also been fortunate enough to present a session to customers on SSRS scalability at a recent Business Intelligence Operations Day in Reading, UK. One thing that struck...

I have the great pleasure of speaking at the next Scottish SQL Server User Group meeting being held in Mocrosoft's Edinburgh ofice on Thursday the 8th of October. Full details can be found on the UK User Group site . My talk will focus on some of the great tools we have for collecting and analysing SQL...

A new whitepaper covering the topic of performance troubleshooting in SQL Server 2008 has now been released. You can download the paper from the following link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd672789.aspx

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. Performance Studio builds on the concept of the...

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 troubleshooting databases that have used a variety...

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 the general performance characteristics of a server...