Dedicated Admin Connection (DAC) is one of the highly touted features introduced in SQL Server 2005. Now that it has been around for a few years, I wonder how it is actually being used or whether it's being used at all in the real world. I have not run into any real production scenarios where I'm forced to use DAC. But that may just be due to my ...

This download is the January 2008 release of SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer.  Get it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=DA0531E4-E94C-4991-82FA-F0E3FBD05E63&displaylang=en

Have you ever needed to find your most expensive queries and quickly grew weary of writing T-SQL against trace tables to try to ferret them out?  Have you ever had to wade through gigabytes of trace data just to find one ill-behaving query?  Have you ever struggled to decide what performance metrics really matter when analyzing Profiler ...