Same plans, markedly different performance!
We all know the importance of looking at execution plans when doing performance optimization. However, just because the plan looks good doesn’t necessarily indicate the best outcome. It’s always important to consider the user-experience, and…
Allowing users to start and stop SQL Server Agent Jobs
I recently received a request to allow certain users to start and stop SQL Server Agent jobs, without giving them the ability to use the SQL Server Agent tools in SQL Server Management Studio. I…
Removing a filegroup that contains data.
Occasionally, you may find you have an extra filegroup that is no longer required for whatever reason. In order to remove that filegroup, you must move all data from that filegroup to a new filegroup….
Can individual filegroups be restored separately?
In this recent answer to a question on dba.stackexchange.com regarding the benefits of read-only filegroups, I posited that one might want to restore individual filegroups to enable a piece-meal approach to disaster recovery that allows…
How can I automate statistics management?
Occasionally, it can be beneficial to turn off AUTO_CREATE_STATISTICS and AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS, and manage these items yourself. I’ve created the following stored procedure, which lives in master to allow it to be called from the context…
Can statistics be updated for objects in read-only filegroups?
DBA.StackExchange.com has an interesting question about the benefits of filegroups and setting filegroups to read-only which I recently answered. I made several assumptions about read-only filegroups that turned out to be incorrect, one of which…