Practical SQL Server notes and troubleshooting

Execution plans, indexes, the transaction log, SQL Agent jobs and wait stats: tested T-SQL for DBAs and developers, with the version it was run on.

How to select specific columns from an EXEC stored procedure result in SQL Server using INSERT EXEC, OPENROWSET and WITH RESULT SETS.

SSIS Raw File Reader: How to Use Raw File Source and Destination

How the SSIS Raw File Source reads .raw binary files, how Raw File Destination writes them, and how the raw format differs from flat files in SSIS.

LINQ to SQL does not expose full-text search; Contains() compiles to LIKE. Here is the ExecuteQuery + CONTAINS workaround with T-SQL and C#.

Database mirroring sends log records to the mirror with no documented compression switch. See which DMVs verify traffic and session state.

Use Event Notifications to capture blocked process reports in SQL Server. T-SQL setup for the threshold, Service Broker queue, and reading the XML.

A page split happens when an 8 KB data page has no room for a row. Learn how it fragments SQL Server indexes, how to detect it, and when to worry.