Give the New PIVOT and UNPIVOT Commands in SQL Server 2005 a Whirl

Nice article about PIVOT and UNPIVOT in SQL Server 2005

This must be painful

Paul Thurrott wrote an article where he urges us to boycott IE because of it's lack of support for standards. Now someone has written a nice reply to this...

Ouch ouch ouch

Let’s get into standards now. Guess what, Paul? Your site,
WinSuperSite.com currently has 124
validation errors, according to the W3C’s Markup Validation Service.
Even worse, the page which contains your “Boycott IE” story currently has 207
validation errors. Both pages don’t even define the page’s doctype,
which is almost always the first line of the web page.

Page splits

Page splits are not too good for performance and should be closely watched.
One way of determining whether you are having page splits and how many is to use the function ::fn_dblog (@StartingLSN, @EndingLSN). Passing NULL to the two parameters makes sure that the whole log is being read.

eg.

SELECT [Object Name], [Index Name], COUNT(*)
FROM ::fn_dblog(NULL, NULL)
WHERE Operation = 'LOP_DELETE_SPLIT'
GROUP BY [Object Name], [Index Name]
ORDER BY COUNT(*) DESC

You can reduce page splits by specifying a good fill factor. There is no real rule of thumb about fill factors. It all depends on the rowsize and number of rows inserted (between index rebuilds). So specifying a good fill factor and a DBCC DBREINDEX from time to time will minimize the number of page splits.