Heaps in SQL Server: Part 4 PFS contention

When inserting rows into a heap, SQL Server must sometimes update the PFS page which can PFS contention and affect...

Heaps in SQL Server: Part 3 Nonclustered Indexes

Uwe Ricken continues his series on heaps. This time he demonstrates a common scenario where the query against a heap...

Heaps in SQL Server: Part 2 Optimizing Reads

In the second article of this series, Uwe Ricken discusses ways to affect the performance of queries involving heaps, including...

Heaps in SQL Server: Part 1 The Basics

Most advice you see online about heaps is to avoid them. In this article, Uwe Ricken describes the basics of...

READ COMMITTED SNAPSHOT ISOLATION and High version_ghost_record_count

Developer shops may decide to use Read Committed Snapshot Isolation (RCSI) to reduce contention, and possibly improve performance, but it...

DELETE Operation in SQL Server HEAPs

You should stick to using tables in SQL Server, rather than heaps that have no clustered index, unless you have...

When AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS Doesn’t Happen

When your SQL Server database is set to have its statistics automatically updated, you will probably conclude that, whenever the...

How Forwarded Records are Read and Processed in a SQL Server Heap

Before you deliberately use a heap in SQL Server rather than a table, it is worth understanding why a heap...