On Monday, October 24, 2016, I will be doing an all-day, Pre-Conference session on how to interpret my SQL Server diagnostic information queries. I have done many shorter versions of this session (such as 60 minutes, 75 minutes, or even a half-day) before, but I have always felt a little rushed as I went through the complete set of diagnostic queries,...

This month, I have several improvements in the SQL Server 2014 and 2016 sets, along with additional comments and documentation in the SQL Server 2012, 2014 and 2016 sets. One new feature is a series of six dashes after each query to make them easier to parse by people who use PowerShell to run the queries and collect the results. I have gotten quite...

I was recently doing some shopping at my local Best Buy, and I wandered through the computer section to see what they were currently selling (as I periodically like to do). While I was standing in the laptop area, a woman approached one of the sales associates and said “I need some help choosing a new laptop. I want something good, but nothing too fancy....

On November 5, 2014, I had the pleasure of presenting Analyzing I/O Subsystem Performance at the PASS 2014 Summit in Seattle. I was in room 6C, coming on after Conor Cunningham’s presentation on Query Store. People seemed to like the session, and I was answering questions  for about 30 minutes after the session was over (with some great assistance from...

Elon Musk unveiled the new Tesla Model S P85D last Thursday at a big event at Hawthorne Airport in California. In my opinion, this was one of the better public events for Tesla that Elon Musk has done (at least among the ones I have seen). This prompted some spirited discussion on Twitter on Fraiday, where my friend Brent Ozar made the case that a Tesla...

Microsoft has announced a new set of VM sizes for Azure Virtual Machines, known as the D-series, that have faster vCPUs (compared to their older A-series Azure VMs) and local, temporary SSDs. These local SSDs are touted as being good locations to use the new Buffer Pool Extensions (BPE) feature that was added to SQL Server 2014, for both Standard Edition...