Christian Bolton is a name some of you might recognize, but even if you don’t, and as Brent blogged – the guy is good. Here’s a recap that Brent put together that illustrates how SQL Server uses memory and some considerations (high level, but note the reference to his recent book) for memory resource planning.

As Brent mentioned, many DBAs still don’t leverage wait events to tune SQL Server. I have to believe that’s because either they don’t know about them, or because wait events are still really not very well documented anywhere…but if you take a look at Quest’s Foglight Performance Analysis for SQL Server you’ll see how leveraging wait events to tune SQL Server can be both easy and powerful.

We’re thrilled to share the news on our latest award! Thanks to everyone who voted to recognize Foglight Performance Analysis for SQL Server. Also, Quest won Gold in Editor’s Choice of Best Development Tool for Toad for SQL Server, and Gold in Editor’s Choice of Best Backup and Recovery Software Product for Litespeed for SQL Server.

Performance Analysis is one of the most remarkable performance management products on the market. It’s StealthCollect agent technology stands alone as the only memory-scraping, high-frequency data collector in the SQL Server market. This translates into visibility and data collection granularity second only to SQL Trace, but at a fraction of the cost imposed by a trace. Why? Because Performance Analysis gathers data in memory and not by querying SQL Server directly, the StealthCollect agent can gather information even when SQL Server is stuck or non-responsive. By coupling this revolutionary collection technology with powerful automated features like intelligent baselining and dynamic alerting, quick comparisons for immediate understanding of changes in activity or behavior, observation-specific diagnostics and advice, built-in change detection and workload correlation, a revolutionary way of looking at blocking lock activity, and a web interface for full alarm automation and workflow, Performance Analysis is definitely worth a look!

After restoring a database from production to development, we often need to copy SQL Server logins too.  But how do we keep their passwords and their SIDs?

Toad does that. Connect to the source SQL Server in Toad and click the Migrate Security button in Connection Manager:

Migrate Security in Toad for SQL Server

The Migrate Security wizard starts and asks which logins you’d like to copy.  It gives you a script that you can copy/paste, or just tell Toad which server you’d like to run it against.  This works with SQL Server 2000, 2005, and 2008.