Imagine you are in the office in the weekend. This week you are responsible to patch a handful of database servers to the next service pack. But after the required reboot one of the servers will no start up. Everything you try from restarting, rolling back to attaching new disks does not help. After troubleshooting all night your manager calls in Microsoft support. An engineer comes onsite, looks at the error log, runs one or two commands and your database is back online.

Sounds frustrating doesn't it? In this session I will share my secrets and how I solved numerous incidents as a Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft Services. But more important, tell you why most database administrators or developers seem to fail at successful troubleshooting major issues.