Extended Events offers a rich filtering mechanism, called predicates, that allows you to reduce the number of events you collect by specifying criteria that will be applied during event collection. (You can find more information about predicates in Using SQL Server 2008 Extended Events (by Jonathan

(K. Brian Kelley) I know in SQL Server you can nest user-defined database roles within the database, but is that a good idea? Do they work the same as Windows groups when they nest? What about how they interact with the SQL Server provided fixed-database roles? In this tip I answer these questions

(Jamie Thomson) It is pretty much accepted by SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) developers that synchronous transformations are generally quicker than asynchronous transformations (for a description of synchronous and asynchronous transformations go read Asynchronous and synchronous data flow c

(Jason Thomas) Ok, so this is not your everyday run-of-the-mill post which talks about how to repeat the same chart for each value selected in the report parameters. I know you have been listening to countless posts instructing how you can do the same with Lists in SSRS (in case you haven’t, this wo

(Richard Waymire) SQL Server error logs are the de facto error reporting location for all the SQL Server services. They provide information about the health of SQL Server that is not found anywhere else. If you want to check Workforce Central running on SQL Server, check the SQL Server error logs. T

(Tim Ford) In my previous article, I provided you with a script that presented the current locks being held in the active database. While this script also provided limited information on blocking that was occuring, it did not give a fully-informative insight on that matter. I alluded to a differen

(Wayne Berry) Have you ever wondered how your queries affect your disk subsystem? With the sys.dm_exec_query_stats dynamic management view in SQL Server, you can find out. No matter how carefully you plan your RAID configuration and your hard drive layout, it is up to SQL Server to determine how to

(Pinalkumar Dave) “How many DMVs and DVFs are there in SQL Server 2008?” – this question was asked to me in one of the recent SQL Server Trainings.

(Buck Woody) One of the first duties you’ll have as a Database Administrator (DBA) or Database Developer after you design a system and secure it properly will be to move data in and out of the system. It’s such a common task that there are several ways you can do it. SQL Server, from the earliest ve

(Jason Thomas) Today I got a call from one of my colleagues asking how to set a default member for a dimension attribute . I was a little surprised as I thought setting a default member is quite straight forward and was even more surprised to learn that the dimension had processed successfully but t