How do -you- install SQL Server (Part 1)

No, this is not an installation guide
There is documentation for that found in many places. First good place to look is Books Online (2005/2008) but there are plenty of other community resources found at sites like SQL Server Central and SQLServerPedia as well as blogs.
What I mean by this post is to ask, “How do [...]

How did I get involved with this SQL Server thing?

There is another quiz going around the SQL Server blogosphere. Great question again, “How did you get started with SQL Server?” I was tagged by Denis Gobo (Blog, Twitter) when he answered this question here. You can hit his blog to track the lineage of this one.
I have been working with SQL Server for just [...]

Benchmarking... Who Needs It?

All of our SQL Server instances need benchmarks!
So the title is somewhat of a trick question… I hear and sense a lack of priority around taking periodic benchmarks in a system with a lot of folks. How often do you take benchmarks? Do you know what “normal” means for your system? Do you know when [...]

Worked fine in development…

How many times have you heard or uttered those words? You work hard and understand the business requirements, you try and get the logic to work to make the procedure return what was expected or update the data as expected. You do some unit tests in your environment, it may not scream but it comes [...]

A Picture That Says,

So I wrote a lot of posts around shrinking (Here, here, here). Some of my posts were turned into a wiki article on SQLServerPedia. I thought I was done posting about this but one more.
I talked about why we shouldn’t do it on a regular basis. Why it should really be reserved for use in [...]