Grant Fritchey The DBA Detective: The Case of the Missing Index When problems arise in SQL Server, we're faced with a server full of suspects, including disk I/O, memory, CPU, incorrect... 15 May 2013 12 min read
Allen White Backup and Restore SQL Server with the SQL Server 2012 PowerShell cmdlets There are plenty of occasions when it makes a lot of sense to do backup and restore scripts in PowerShell.... 03 May 2013 15 min read
Kat Hicks Diagnosing Common Database Ails When a database starts showing signs of an illness, it's up to the DBA to get to the root of... 25 March 2013 13 min read
Tony Davis Shawn McGehee Managing the SQL Server Transaction Log: Dealing with Explosive Log Growth You've just become responsible for a database, only to find that the log file is growing out of control. Why... 14 March 2013 13 min read
Seth Delconte Ad-Hoc XML File Querying When you need to shred just part of the data within a large XML file into a SQL Server table,... 05 March 2013 15 min read
Alexander Karmanov Automating SQL Server Database Deployments: A Worked Example Alex talks through a simple practical example of a database deployment, First creating a empty database and then upgrading it... 27 February 2013 21 min read
Feodor Georgiev Full Text Searches on Documents in FileTables SQL Server's FileTable technology is an intriguing way of accomodating file-based text data in a database, and allowing for complex... 14 February 2013 11 min read
Alexander Karmanov An Incremental Database Development and Deployment Framework Often, an existing database application must evolve quickly by incremental steps. Alex describes a tried and tested system to provide... 12 February 2013 27 min read
Robert Sheldon Getting Started with Extended Events in SQL Server 2012 Extended Events provide a way of unintrusively monitoring what's going on in a SQL Server instance. Unlike SQL Server Profiler... 04 February 2013 16 min read
Phil Factor Database Deployment: The Bits – Versioning Although databases have no inherent way of recording their version numbers, SQL Server provides the means of doing so, and... 04 February 2013 11 min read
Fabiano Amorim Using Optimizer_WhatIF and StatsStream to Simulate a Production Environment SQL Server's Query optimiser judges the best query plan from the data in the relevant tables and the server's hardware.... 30 January 2013 9 min read
Warwick Rudd Expanding AlwaysOn Availability Groups with Replication Subscribers High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) can be provided for subscription databases from an AlwaysOn Avaliability Group, but the... 18 January 2013 8 min read
Gail Shaw The SQL Server Instance That Will not Start Everyone's SQL Server nightmare: The instance will not start. If such a problem strikes you, keep calm, follow Gail's advice,... 17 January 2013 29 min read
Warwick Rudd Expanding AlwaysOn Availability Groups with Replication Publishers SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Groups provide a high-availability and disaster-recovery solution for you SQL Server 2012 environments. Replication has... 14 January 2013 9 min read
Feodor Georgiev HDDs, SSDs and Database Considerations In this article Feodor clears up a few myths about storage, explains the difference in how HDDs and SSDs work... 09 January 2013 11 min read
Robert Sheldon Handling Errors in SQL Server 2012 The error handling of SQL Server has always been somewhat mysterious. Now at last, the THROW statement has been included... 03 January 2013 10 min read
Fabiano Amorim Hypothetical Indexes on SQL Server Sometimes, you have to test out alternative indexing strategies, but the task of creating the candidate indexes would just take... 18 December 2012 8 min read
Grant Fritchey SQL Server Backup Questions We Were Too Shy to Ask During presentations about doing database backups and restores, there seem to be two types of questions that are commonly asked... 07 December 2012 20 min read
William Brewer Disaster Recovery Planning for Data: The Cribsheet Planning for disaster recovery and business continuity aren't amongst the most exciting IT activities. They are, however, essential and relevant... 07 December 2012 13 min read
Buck Woody Setting up a Data Science Laboratory There is no better way of understanding new data processing, retrieval, analysis or visualising techniques than actually trying things out.... 03 December 2012 21 min read
