Make SSMS start faster A couple of years ago, I blogged about some ways to make Management Studio start faster. With the latest builds of SQL Server 2012, it seems to be slower than...

Where is my graphical ShowPlan? Many of you on SQL Server 2008 R2 are experiencing a major annoyance with SSMS since installing service pack 1 – when clicking a plan from grid results, you...

Books Online articles referencing built-in CLR functions (such as FORMAT()) have a remark similar to the following: FORMAT relies on the presence of .the .NET Framework Common Language Runtime (CLR). A lot of people...

Today on the twitter hash tag #sqlhelp, @leenux_tux asked: How can I figure out the percentage of fields that don't have data ? After further clarification, it turns out he is after what proportion...

A year ago today, I made quite easily the best decision of my career, and joined the folks at SQL Sentry. I explained a lot of this process in a blog post last year,...

On Friday, we published a new version of our free query plan analysis tool, SQL Sentry Plan Explorer. We've added a couple of important features: SQL Server 2012 support With a whole slew of...

See why you might be getting unexpected syntax errors when using builtins within table-valued function calls.

See a quick metadata script that finds all tables, across all user databases, without a primary key.

This is a rough morning. Got in at 2:00 AM, then had no water in my hotel this morning. I doubt I will ever voluntarily stay at the Seattle Hilton again. Still, I'm very...

VP Finance, Bill Graziano comes on stage in a great kilt (but white socks!). No Tina Turner this year. 1,000 people from 53 countries watched the keynote yesterday. He recognizes Tim Radney (@tradney) and...

Before the lights came down, I had already hit what will probably be the highlight of my morning: having a brief conversation with Dr. David DeWitt. Rushabh Mehta, President, PASS Rushabh Mehta comes on...

Since installing Juneau, I've had various issues accomplishing even the simplest of tasks. I would get errors saying that the SqlCeManager could not be initialized or "object reference not set to an instance of...

On older versions of SQL Server, it was tedious work tying DBCC INPUTBUFFER output to active requests. See one way we used to do this.

I wanted to lay out my rough schedule at PASS Summit 2011, so you'll know where to find me. And this is as much for me as it is for you – this is...

At SQLBits this week, a colleague of Chris Testa-O'Neill (twitter) asked me a question about Policy-Based Management. Specifically, he wanted to know how to determine, programmatically, which execution modes are applicable to each facet...

Last week I went to Liverpool, UK – birthplace of The Beatles – to speak and to represent SQL Sentry at SQL Bits 9. I have to hand it to these guys – James,...

Where is SYSDATE()? I've talked about this one before, but due to a recent conversation about building a datetime value from separate date/time columns or variables, it may be worth bringing up again. When...

In some circles I'm known as "the Connect guy" because I've filed a heck of a lot of suggestions and bugs that I've envisioned or encountered, and I'm often willing to file an issue...

UPDATE 2016-10-07 – This demo kit has been overhauled: https://sentryone.com/blog/aaronbertrand/plan-explorer-3-0-demo-kit

SQLSaturday #84 : Kalamazoo, MI : September 17th I will be giving two sessions at SQLSaturday #84 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. One is on "What's New in SQL Server Denali" and the other, "T-SQL :...

This question came up on twitter, and I thought a quick blog post would be better than a series of 140-character snippets. Management Studio does not do the best job at highlighting missing indexes....

This week I reported a few bugs – one with sp_helptext, one with Activity Monitor in Management Studio, and one in the new sys.dm_server_services DMV. #683234 : sp_helptext treats non-system objects as system objects...