One week after #sqlsat132

  It has been nearly one week since SQL Saturday 132 in Pensacola Florida.  I was chosen to give my talk on “Know Backups and Know Recovery”.  The session was in the first time slot and when I arrived at the event just before 8:00 AM I had to walk through about 4 inches of […]

Turn on Instant File Initialization for SQL Server Performance – With Video Demo

Without Instant File Initialization turned on, each time a data file on SQL Server 2005 and above is created or has to grow in size, the file or portion of the file added must be zeroed out.  Depending on the size of the file this can be a very time consuming task. By turning on […]

Turn on Instant File Initialization for SQL Server Performance

Without Instant File Initialization turned on, each time a data file on SQL Server 2005 and above is created or has to grow in size, the file or portion of the file added must be zeroed out.  Depending on the size of the file this can be a very time consuming task. By turning on […]

SQL Server – Cannot resolve collation conflict

A friend of mine contacted me through email today having a very common problem with a query he had written.  He received an error, “cannot resolve collation conflict for equal to operator”. Early in my career I had experienced the same issue so I quickly searched my code snippets and found where I had used […]

How to restore the tail end of a transaction log

Have you ever tried to restore a backup over an existing database and receive an error stating the tail of the log for the database has not been backed up? Many times if you are just restoring a database into a development environment you don’t care so you just restore WITH REPLACE and move on. […]