A few months back, Microsoft gave MVPs a few MSDN Ultimate subscriptions to pass on to community members, no strings attached.  I quietly gave mine to a few deserving folks who I thought could be future MVPs, but Arnie Rowland (Blog – @ArnieRowland) had a better idea. Arnie’s Project Phoenix encourages developers to propose a [...]

A few months ago, I had The Idea.  I wanted to conduct SQL Server training on a cruise ship.  I emailed a few buddies and offered to start a company called SQLCruise with them, and out of three friends, only one could say yes.  I don’t have anything against the two who said no.  I [...]

Most SQL Server DBAs don’t even like MySQL, let alone NoSQL.  They cringe when they hear people say things like, “I don’t need transactions” or “The data will eventually be consistent” or “Indexes will be supported in the next version.” SQL Server and Oracle people are constantly trying to out-feature each other, and the abject [...]

In August 2008, Lady Gaga released her premier album The Fame. This 13-track work produced several hit singles including Just Dance, Poker Face, and Paparazzi – but it also produced plenty of controversy. Her exaggerated use of fashion, musical cliches, and sex gave her plenty of media attention – both good and bad. If you’ve [...]

Pop quiz: should you be worried if your SQL Server’s page life expectancy is averaging 214? There’s only one correct answer: it depends.

Performance tuning is all about finding the RIGHT bottleneck, focusing on it, and fixing it to the application owner’s satisfaction. Learn what happens if you don’t do it right.