I first posted an update to sp_helpindex here. My version of sp_helpindex was solely to expand what sp_helpindex showed and adds 1 or 2 things based on version: for SQL2005+ it adds included columns and for SQL2008 it also adds the filter predicate. So, there were two versions of sp_helpindex2 depending on which verison ...

YES!!! OK, well, I guess I should be more specific because as in most things in SQL Server, the real answer is ''it depends''. And for these two options, it depends mostly on your SQL Server version. Since SQL Server 7.0, the way that auto update works, has changed (much so ...

I am pleased to announce that the BIDS Helper team have just released v1.3 which is our first release with support for SQL Server 2008. With these release we have also improved our international support. All of the features in BIDS Helper still only display in English in their user interfaces. But in previous versions, some of the features of ...

OK, I first posted on some of the limitations to indexes in SQL Server 2005 and 2008 in part one here. Now, I want to dive into index internals for a post (or two). And, I often get the question “who is the best audience for your blog – or, for this post” and well, that’s a bit hard to answer. At SQL Connections in Orlando, I delivered a ...

Memorial Day weekend we were in Chicago to celebrate my Father's life. We did a ''Celebration of Life'' memorial and we had a few drinks (celebratory Meyers, Tonic and lime - which was my Father's favorite drink), we (7 of us) gave a few heartfelt speeches, and a few friends wrote a song (and passed out the words - to which we ...

A frequently asked question that surfaced again today is, ''how do I see when my data has been accessed last?''  SQL Server does not track this information for you.  SELECT triggers still do not exist.  Third party tools are expensive and can incur unexpected overhead.  And people continue to be reluctant or unable to constrain ...

In my blog post on my new sp_helpindex proc (sp_helpindex2), I mentioned that the indexes in my sample were not necessarily a recommended set of indexes - just a test set of indexes. So... in this post, I thought I'd start a series on indexes, limitations and best practices/uses... Especially, why/how to best choose when to ...

OK - so this has been frustrating me for many months... when you create indexes with included columns (which was a new feature of SQL Server 2005), they're not shown by sp_helpindex or by DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS. I understand this not showing for statistics because included columns are not factored into the histogram (that's only the high ...

OK, I still have a way to go in learning about data compression in SQL Server 2008 but one thing that I do know is that nothing is free. So, the trade-off will be performance (i.e. CPU) v. space. And, that's not really a new trade-off wrt to compression. Sometimes that trade-off has other benefits that still minimize the ...