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
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
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
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
Database Administration Gail Shaw in Database Administration SQL Server Won’t Start: Causes, Errors, and Fixes SQL Server won't start? This guide covers the most common causes: incorrect service account password, missing or corrupt master/model/TempDB database... 17 January 2013 30 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
Database Administration Feodor Georgiev in Database Administration 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
Database Administration Seth Delconte in Database Administration SQL Server XML: Creating, Shredding, and Combining XML Data with T-SQL Manipulate XML data in SQL Server using T-SQL: create XML from tables with FOR XML, shred XML to rows with... 23 October 2012 14 min read