While helping a friend, I found the Technical Reference Guides for Designing Mission-Critical Solutions, an interactive map of architecture guidance.
SQL SERVER – Reducing CXPACKET Wait Stats for High Transactional Database
Reducing CXPACKET wait stats on a high transactional database: what CXPACKET means, and when lowering the degree of parallelism really helps.
SQL SERVER – White Papers – Consolidation Guidance for SQL Server – Consolidation Using SQL Server 2008
Two white papers by Allan Hirt: Consolidation Guidance for SQL Server, which compares three consolidation options, and Consolidation Using SQL Server 2008.
SQLAuthority News – Data Compression Strategy Capacity Planning and Best Practices
A Microsoft white paper on data compression in SQL Server 2008: strategy, capacity planning, best practices, and the trade-off of I/O savings for CPU.
SQL SERVER – Tuning the Performance of Change Data Capture in SQL Server 2008
Change Data Capture records changes without triggers or schema changes. Here are my notes on tuning the performance of Change Data Capture in SQL Server 2008.
SQL SERVER – Outer Join in Indexed View – Question to Readers
Why can’t you use an outer join in indexed view definitions? The SQL Server 2008 white paper answer, plus my question to you: can you show an example?
SQL SERVER – Interesting Observation – Index on Index View Used in Similar Query
A query on the base table used an index it did not own. It was the index on index view of the same table, an interesting observation from an optimization project.