Solid fix here. Works for SQL Upgrade Advisor, too

Despite the explosion of VMware into the data center we remain the new kid on the block. As soon as performance suffers the first reaction is to blame the new kid. But next time you see a performance problem in your production environment, I urge you to look at the issue as a consolidation challenge, and not a virtualization problem. Follow the best practices you have been using for years and you can correct this problem without needing to call me and my colleagues to town.

PRO TIP: Rebuild your indexes!

FML

great comments

getting down and dirty with databases -- links marked "Inside the..." particularly good

This is awesome, I had no idea T-SQL could do this.

son of a...useful to know.

This is a handy stored procedure dealing with Orphaned users.

On the Oracle database, by simply setting its cursor_sharing parameter to forced, the transaction throughput went up from ~1,200 per second to ~16,000 per second ... SQL Server 2005 has a similar database option called forced parameterization.

SS Express is turning into a headache.

Some useful functions in order to deal with SQL Server Job Agent's integer timestamps (one field YYYYMMDD and one field HHMMSS)

There's no support at the TSQL level to keep generations of backups. For instance, you want to keep backups for 3 days. The functionality is available in Maintenance Plans (MP), but sometimes you want a higher degree of customization.

excellent!

master.dbo.xp_sqlagent_enum_jobs rocks

interesting msft whitepaper about storage requirements/recommendations for migration to SQL Server 2005