I hope you’ve had a great week.
Here’s this weeks roundup of SQL Server Blog Posts, News and Techie Stuff. Enjoy!
SQL Server Links
- How Quest is Bringing DBAs Online – Discover how Quest are harnessing the expert knowledge of DBA’s globally in this post by Brent Ozar.
- Finding your Missing Keys – Well defined relationships are a fundamental feature of effective databases and Michael J Swart (The Database Whisperer) shows how you can validate yours.
- Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server 2008 Pre-reading List – Want to be a grand master of all things SQL Server? Here is the Microsoft Certified Master recommended reading list to get you on the right track.
- Getting the Most Out of SQL Server Profiler Using Templates – Discover how to work effectively with SQL Server Profiler templates with Brad McGehee.
- Where do the Books Online index fragmentation thresholds come from? – IMPORTANT – If you are a DBA then you need to read this post. Did you know that the recommended fragmentation thresholds for index optimisation were just made up?
- What can cause log reads and other transaction log questions – Another excellent and technically detailed post from the Paul Randal.
- Conor vs. “Does Join Order Matter?” – An interesting and technical discussion from Conor Cunningham about how SQL server can on occasion produce differing query plans for statements you would presume identical.
- Tracking Down Elusive Query Timeouts – Have you ever needed to use the AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS_ASYNC database setting? Do you know why you would perhaps want to? Here’s an excellent real world walk-through from the The Database Whisperer showing how he tackled a problem that was resolved using the AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS_ASYNC setting.
- Some SQL Server 2005/2008 Monitoring Stored Procedures – Five excellent monitoring stored procedures courtesy of Glenn Berry.
Misc Techie Stuff
- Tasks and Time Management in Outlook – I’m a big fan of Getting Things Done and so thought I would share this post with you about working with Tasks in Outlook to support this method of time management.
- Microsoft Creates Server and Cloud Division – Departmental consolidation in the Microsoft camp.
- 10 Tips for a secure Christmas – The British Computer Society offers some festive security tips.
That’s it for this week. If I’ve missed anything that you think is worth mentioning then be sure to let me know. Fire me an email or a tweet on Twitter. Have a great weekend!
