The DBA Daily Checklist
by Tony Davis | 13 May 2008
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7 comments 
A Simple-Talk forum entry made us wonder whether we really knew all the things that DBAs had to check daily on their servers. "…last week some idiot turned a host of triggers off in our ERP system, causing a cascade of posting problems on dozens of orders before we caught the root cause…" It must have caused chaos. What else should a DBA be checking?
Execution Plan Basics
by Grant Fritchey | 11 May 2008
| 12 comments | 
Every day, out in the various discussion boards devoted to Microsoft SQL Server, the same types of questions come up again and again: Why is this query running slow? Is my index getting used? Why isn't my index getting used? Why does this query run faster than this query?. The correct response is probably different in each case, but in order to arrive at the answer you have to ask the same return question in each case: have you looked at the execution plan?
The Why and How of .NET Profiling
by Amirthalingam Prasanna | 12 May 2008
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Amirthalingam Prasanna gives a simple and practical guide to why you need to profile your .NET applications and how you would go about doing it.
Looking over the developers' shoulders. -ANTS Performance Profiler 4
by Bart Read | 12 May 2008
| 2 comments 
You can get your hands on a very early, very rough version of ANTS
Performance Profiler 4. It’s not a beta, it’s not beta quality, it really is a just a development build. So if you’re feeling brave you might want to download it and give it a try. We're all really quite excited about this, and we really hope that, despite the warts, you’re going to like it.
Event, sit! Event, staaaay...
by RobertChipperfield | 08 May 2008
| 1 comment 
Robert shows how easy it is to be caught out by the way that the CLR Garbage Collector is sometimes too ready to be rid of a COM object when the applicaion is still listening for events from it. So how do you stop it happening? Read on....
SQL Code Layout and Beautification
by William Brewer | 11 May 2008
| 9 comments | 
William Brewer takes a look at the whole topic of SQL Code layout and beautification, an important aspect to SQL programming style. He concludes that once you are tired of laying SQL out by hand, you had better choose a tool with plenty of knobs to twiddle, because nobody seems to agree on the best way of doing it
.NET Performance Cribsheet
by Robyn Page and Phil Factor | 11 May 2008
| 1 comment | 
Robyn and Phil tackle the topic of how to make .NET applications perform well. As usual, they try to take a terse, practical approach to the mysteries of JIT, CLR and GC. After giving many performance tips, they come to the conclusion that rules and tips are less useful than rolling up your sleeves and measuring or profiling everything possible, to see what's really happening with your application.
The Burning Men - The IT drug habit
by Richard Morris | 29 April 2008
| 8 comments | 
It would seem bizzare that IT staff who depend on their quick wits for their living should ever think it a good idea to fry their brains with recreational drugs. It is therefore worrying to hear that there has been a 34 percent increase in IT employees in the US testing positive for cocaine usage in the workplace. We sent the taciturn Richard Morris to find out more.
SSIS Package Componentization
by David Leibowitz | 29 April 2008
| 10 comments | 
In this article, David Leibowitz describes methods for scalable SQL Server 2005 Integration Services package creation. If you’re no stranger to OOP, then the methods described will fit nicely in your enterprise ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) toolkit.
The Time Bomb
by Phil Factor | 29 April 2008
| 5 comments | 
Phil cheerfully admits to his fair share of accidental IT disasters. His experiences some time ago with the Time Bomb, where his software crashed and threatened civil unreast in a far-away country were, however, deliberate.