Trace blocking chains from active requests to a candidate head session, inspect sleeping transactions, and verify the owner before action.
Columnstore Rowgroup Health: Finding Small and Open Rowgroups
Inspect columnstore rowgroup health, understand small and deleted groups, and choose reorganize or rebuild from measured evidence.
Multi-Statement Table-Valued Functions and Interleaved Execution
See how interleaved execution corrects estimates for multi-statement table-valued functions and when an inline rewrite wins.
Multi-Column Index Key Order: Which Column Goes First
Test index key order with equality, range, and OR predicates, then use seek predicates and logical reads to choose the lead column.
Deprecated System Tables: Replacing sysobjects and sysindexes
Old catalog views still answer, but their page counts can be far too small. A short demo shows the gap and how to replace them.
SQL SERVER – Parallelism for Heap Scan
Two DBAs asked me if their table needed a clustered index. Our conversation during a Health Check turned into a lesson on parallelism for Heap Scan.
SQL Authroity News – Optimizing Lazy Spool – PASS Blog
A sneak preview of my SQLPASS sessions: I wrote about optimizing Lazy Spool on the PASS blog, and here are the first two paragraphs with a link to the rest.