(Thomas LaRock) I don’t want to alarm you, but your cloud is infested with vampires.

(Jason Brimhall) As is true in most facets of life, things tend to get stale and old. Sometimes this staleness can be visibly represented as the wrinkles on your face. Other times, as with SQL Server, it may mean that a stored procedure or view stops working.

(Pinal Dave) Most of my earnings come from my role as SQL Server Performance Tuning and Optimization consultant. Every single day I work with few customers so that I can maintain the quality of my work with each of them.

(Nakul Vachhrajani) One of the first things I do when I start work on a new database is to use “sp_help” to go through each table and study their structure.

(FonsecaSergio) If you try to create more than 4 geo-replicas in the Portal it will fail with the error message “Replication limit reached. The database ‘XXXXX’ cannot have more than 4 replication relationships.”

(Pablo Echeverria) In this tip we’re going describe what parallelism is, the benefits, and how to take advantage of parallelism in SQL Server with some examples.

(Ahmad Yaseen) In the previous articles of this series, we discussed a group of SQL Server Execution Plan operators that you will face when studying the SQL Execution Plan of different queries.

(Grant Fritchey) I was recently asked if we are going to see performance differences if we explicitly drop temporary tables. I couldn’t remember the specifics, but I said it actually didn’t matter. However, that answer has bugged me, so I set up a quick test.

(Chris Webb) The problem with self-service BI is that you never quite know what your users are up to. For example, what data sources are they using? Are there hundreds of Excel files being used as data sources for reports that you don’t know about?

(Pinal Dave) Every consulting engagement is different and I enjoy interacting with different people while I am working with different experts. Earlier this week, here is what I heard during one of the Comprehensive Database Performance Health Check engagement about Parallelism for Heap Scan.