You might have noticed that January was a quiet blogging month for me.  Part of the reason was that I was working on a series of articles for Simple Talk, examining how parallel query execution really works.  The first part is published today at: http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/learn-sql-server/understanding-and-using-parallelism-in-sql-server/ . This introductory piece is not quite as deeply technical as my SQLblog posts tend to be, but I hope there be enough interesting material to make...(read more)