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
Feodor Georgiev How come the Hourglass? Why database applications slow down It is frustrating when you hit 'submit' and you get the hourglass big-time. Is it the database to blame? It... 28 November 2012 12 min read
Feodor Georgiev Handling Backups for Rapid Resilience The backup and restore system in SQL Server hasn't changed a great deal over the years despite a huge growth... 20 November 2012 10 min read
Feodor Georgiev How come the Hourglass? Why database applications slow down It is frustrating when you hit 'submit' and you get the hourglass big-time. Is it the database to blame? It... 10 November 2012 12 min read
Joe Sack Fixing Gatekeeper Row Cardinality Estimate Issues The Query Optimiser needs a good estimate of the number of rows likely to be returned by each physical operator... 01 November 2012 18 min read
William Brewer Database Deployment Cribsheet As part of our long-running Cribsheet series, we asked William to write a guide to deployment that described in general... 29 October 2012 14 min read
Seth Delconte Manipulating XML Data in SQL Server When the average database developer is obliged to manipulate XML, either shredding it into relational format, or creating it from... 23 October 2012 14 min read
Dmitri Korotkevitch Partitioned Tables, Indexes and Execution Plans: a Cautionary Tale Table partitioning is a blessing in that it makes large tables that have varying access patterns more scalable and manageable,... 23 October 2012 20 min read
Feodor Georgiev Designing Databases for Rapid Resilience As the volume of data increases, DBAs need to plan more actively for rapid restores in the event of failure.... 15 October 2012 12 min read
Joe Sack Exploring Semantic Search Key Term Relevance SQL Server's 'Semantic Search' feature seemed an exciting feature when first shown. Was it really true that Microsoft had come... 09 October 2012 7 min read
Seth Delconte Getting Started With XML Indexes XML Indexes make a huge difference to the speed of XML queries, as Seth Delconte explains; and demonstrates by running... 25 September 2012 17 min read
Glenn Berry Provisioning a New SQL Server Instance – Part Three Once you've installed and configured SQL Server 2012, there are some tasks that should be done to ensure that maintenance,... 18 September 2012 12 min read
Laerte Junior The PoSh DBA: Solutions using PowerShell and SQL Server PowerShell is worth using when it is the quickest way to providing a solution. For the DBA, it is much... 18 September 2012 15 min read
Robert Sheldon Report Builder 3.0: Formatting the Elements in your Report There is a lot that can be done to make basic tabular reports more readable, using Microsoft's free Report Builder.... 12 September 2012 16 min read
Grant Fritchey Why is that SQL Server Instance under stress? There are several reliable indications, using SQL Queries, of the what is causing SQL Server performance problems. Some of these... 11 September 2012 14 min read
Gail Shaw Gail Shaw’s SQL Server Howlers For the latest in our series of SQL Server Howlers, we asked Gail Shaw which common SQL Server mistakes and... 14 August 2012 22 min read
Glenn Berry Provisioning a New SQL Server Instance – Part Two So how should you install and configure SQL Server 2012 properly? Glenn Berry completes his two-part series by explaining the... 13 August 2012 11 min read
