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 ...

Database troubleshooting is not for the faint of heart, especially when it comes to troubleshooting locking and blocking problems. Sometimes the elephant in the room is actually a rhino, a problem ...

As I discussed in an earlier column, SQL Server keeps a plan cached for each query it sees (assuming the query requires planning in the first place, of course). That's great for speeding up processing ...