Just had an idea (try this somewhere besides production first!)

begin transaction

select * from sysobjects with (holdlock, xlock) where type = 'TR'

Then wait and see who gets blocked....

Not sure how to monitor/audit this problem with acceptable results (polling for locks on and/or changes to sysobjects seems pretty iffy; too bad you cannot put triggers on system tables).

Have...

Or you could use the redirection operators:

type header.txt > combined.txt

type detail.txt >> combined.txt

View advocates should beware that views across servers (using linked servers, i.e. four-part object names) are extremely inefficient as they must be materialized (by importing the entire base table from...

I have had this happen when using multiple files in a filegroup, when some of them have a maximum size. If the server places an object on a file with a...

I have not had experience with Raid 10. In general, more spindles are better, but more logical drives are also good. I would suggest arranging your 6 36GB drives in...

Check out code from a "describe" procedure on http://www.sqlsavior.com/describe.html:

 select

               convert(varchar(60), c.name) as 'column name',

               case t.name

                       when 'varchar' then convert(varchar(17), 'varchar(' + convert(varchar, c.length) + ')' )

                       when 'nvarchar'...

The term "data warehouse" can mean a lot of different things to different people. Some think of OLAP and cubes, etc., but a simple definition might be: a database reorganized...

Too bad I cannot find the old white paper on the SQL optimizer. It discussed techniques like reducing the query tree or parse tree; the point being that the SQL...

Check out the book "SQL Server 2000 Performance Tuning" (Edward Whalen, Marcilina Garcia, Steve Adrien DeLuca, Dean Thompson). Chapter 8 has quite a bit about queueing theory and the "knee...

You can set up SQL Mail and use the xp_sendmail procedure to issue a query and email the results, either as an attachment, or at the end of the email...

I agree that 3 separate indexes would be best in most cases. An exception would be if you know for a fact that an overwhelming majority of queries that will be...

10 minutes vs. 20 seconds is quite a difference! Are they both executing from the same machine? If not, check for a network problem on the slower one. We once...

How about trying it during your maintenance window and letting us know if it helped any? (If it helps noticably, I would be surprised, but it would be good to...

How about:

while exists(select * from tablename where field2 = value2 and field1 <> value1)

  begin

  set rowcount 10000

  Update tablename

  Set field1 = value1

  Where field2 = value2 and field1...