Creating the SSC Maintenance Plan: Part 3

Note: This is an in-depth article that exceeds 5,000 words, and provides a case-study of how a maintenance plan could be implemented on a single, plain vanilla, SQL Server instance.
As I have mentioned in previous parts of this article series (part 1, part 2), I act as a consultant DBA for the SQLServerCentral.com (SSC) and ...read more


What Would You Like to See in a New Book on Indexing?

I am currently in the early stages of writing an outline for a new book on indexing, targeted towards novice DBAs. While this topic has been done to death in hundreds of articles, presentations, and books, I think there is still room for a book that makes the topic easy to read and easy to ...read more


Free eBook on SQL Server Maintenance Plans Now Available

My new eBook, Brad’ Sure Guide to SQL Server Maintenance Plans is now available as a free, 269 page PDF eBook. The book is designed for part-time or novice DBAs who want to learn how to properly create Maintenance Plans using the tools that come with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) in SQL Server 2005/2008.
These ...read more


Learn Free at SQLLunch

Not every DBA has the time to sit down and spend a couple of hours learning about some new topic in SQL Server. But most DBAs can find 15 to 30 minutes to squeeze in a little learning, here and there. That is the concept behind www.sqllunch.com, a new website devoted to providing short bits ...read more


How to Use SQL Backup Inside a Maintenance Plan

When you create a SQL Server Maintenance Plan using the Maintenance Plan Wizard or the Maintenance Plan Designer, the SQL Server native backup command is used to perform full, differential, and transaction log backups. But what if you want to use backup compression to reduce the size of your backups and the amount of time ...read more


New Article on Clustering Myths in the PASS SQL Server Standard

The PASS SQL Server Standard has published a new article called “Busting 6 SQL Server Failover Clustering Myths”, by Kathi Kellenberger. You can download the free article (its in the PDF format) if you are a PASS member. If you aren’t a PASS member, you can join PASS for free, and then download the ...read more


A Time and a Place for the SQL Server Maintenance Plan Wizard

Reprinted from my editorial in Database Weekly.
In the course of my job, I get to give a lot of presentations, at various conference and user group events, many of them offering advice to DBAs on how to maintain their SQL Server databases. Aware of its limitations and failings I, like many other experienced DBAs, initially ...read more


Introduction to the SQL Server 2008 Resource Governor

This is an excerpt from my free eBook, Brad’s Sure Guide to SQL Server 2008.
I think most of us are familiar with this situation: a SQL Server database is the backend of an OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) application, but you are required to allow users to run any reports they want on the production data, ...read more


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