Secured by default, secured by design is the buzzword and catchy stuff for any Enterprise IT administrators. Then it comes about standards and policies to follow such as ISO , with the recent threats (last 10 years) and vulnerabilities within IT world it is most important factor you need to follow as...

DMV - has got very special place for DBAs since the inception of SQL Server 2005. In this case one of the thme is very important to find out the index statistics within your database, such as sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats statement. Recently one of the user complained about running DMVs on a specific...

Have you looked at the Activity Monitor screen within the Managment Studio? I feel this is somewhat surprise features included from February CTP (or was it there before?). This is more useful to the DBAs to have a look at resource activity and locking/blocking. There is no doubt that Ken Henderson's...

SQL Server Performance Tuning, sounds familiar on a DBA perspective and though it sounds like an easy words but when you start analyzing the problem it is far deeper inside. When you refer to the web resources such as forums/newsgroups then a common question will be fulfill of improving performance on...

Usage of Temporary tables or variables is a common scenario in SQL Server world, since SQL Server 2005 usage of TEMPDB references to the blog posts here: http://sqlserver-qa.net/blogs/tools/archive/2007/04/05/sql-server-index-optimization-best-practices.aspx , http://sqlserver-qa.net/blogs/tools/archive...

Have you ever performed huge operations such as deleting records of a table and processing inserts on that table at the same time? This is a common task that every application will have to perform and you can avoid by fine tuning your queries (mostly deletes). As you are aware the inserts operations...

As a DBA you must be aware that slow or long running queries can contribute to excessive resource consumption and be the consequence of blocked queries. No database application is exception to this behaviour, so the queries that also run slowly because of wait states for logical lockas and system resources...

Here comes another Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) on the forums and Frequently Posted Blog (FPB) here about high cpu issues on the SQL Server 2000 instances. Looking at high cpu spiks and performace issues is a common problem in all SQL Server installations, handling this issue within SQL Server 2005...

PARALLELISM is a close friend of DBA where you get to see it as a common occurence in the multi-processor server environment and during such performance issues you can also investigate whether a parallel plan is in use. For instance If a particular query is slow when it is using a parallel plan, you...

Its a general assumption that whenever performance is degraded, the finger will be pointed to SQL Server, pretty easy eh!? If you look at any of the SQL Server related forums then 3 in 10 questions asks same question and nothing but shove blame on SQL Server. It is always better to be proactive than...