SQL Server comes with a wide array of tools for monitoring your environment. There are logs and traces that provide information when errors occur, but these are often used passively to react to events that have already occurred.  There's PerfMon, and Profiler, and loads of Dynamic Management Views to check.  But where to look? As ...

Maybe I'm a little late to the party, but I thought I would share with you the most recent release of Microsoft's Best Practices Analyzer for SQL Server 2008 R2 (you can also read the original blog announcement from CSS). Let me be clear: this tool is not just for people who are already on SQL Server 2008 R2.  It will also happily analyze ...