As Joey explains, Activity Monitor consumes a lot of resources and yields little usable data. Here are some third-party alternatives. I get to work with a lot of customers, so I get to see a lot of ...

A common task that all database and system administrators face is patching systems. Patching your systems is very important -- first and foremost, security fixes are included in patches. Patches also ...

There’s a very handy new tool from Microsoft called the Database Experimentation Assistant (DEA). The DEA makes it very easy to conduct A/B testing for SQL Server upgrades, providing quantitative ...

As a heavy user of other RDBMS data platforms, I have long appreciated the extra effort that Microsoft put into their data management and administration tool, the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS).

In this second delve into data cleanliness (read the first, How clean is your data?, here), we’ll test-drive the data profiling tool provided with Microsoft SQL Server. Other profiling tools have ...

A small social media poll from Visual Studio guru Mads Kristensen split respondents over whether the IDE should add more database tooling, while the discussion quickly turned to existing SQL project ...