Naming conventions are a very subjective thing, of course. Just like coding styles, they can often lead to anything from minor debates to full-blown religious arguments. Upper case vs. lower case keywords, tabs vs. spaces, and where to put commas come to mind. Heck, these same people even get into sub-arguments about whether the terms “upper … Read more Subjectivity: Naming Standards

Recently I have spoken with a number of people about the key things that they monitor when it comes to SQL Server, with the key metrics CPU, Memory, and I/O mentioned. Some others set up alerts for specific errors or severity of errors, however one thing that comes up very rarely is monitoring for Suspect … Read more Monitoring for Suspect Pages

Let’s forget about performance for a moment, or even user-facing processes at all. A lot of tasks are admin-related and require at least the concept of looping, if not an explicit loop or cursor (or multiple). Think about how you would do these things in T-SQL otherwise:  The search ultimately needs to check every string column in … Read more 4 Practical Use Cases for Grouped Concatenation

What Prompted This Post? As lots of you know already, Kevin Kline has joined us here at SQL Sentry. I’ve followed Kevin myself for a good while, so I’m really excited to have him here with us. One of the first things Kevin asked of me was to list the top 5 technical issues we … Read more The Top 5 Most Common SQL Server Performance Problems