Enrico van de Laar The SQL Server 2016 Query Store: Overview and Architecture SQL Server's Query Store, introduced in SQL Server 2016, helps to troubleshoot query performance by capturing a range of information... 16 November 2015 14 min read
Grant Fritchey Using SQL Prompt to Accelerate the Top 10 Most Common Database Scripts There may be some people who enjoy repetitive typing, but Grant Fritchey doesn't. He's always preferred SQL Prompt. The standard... 04 November 2015 8 min read
William Brewer Questions About CUBE, ROLLUP and GROUPING SETs That You Were Too Shy to Ask There are few parts of SQL Syntax as familiar as the GROUP BY clause of the SELECT statement. On the... 03 November 2015 17 min read
Phil Factor Routine SQL DML Testing for the Unenthusiastic Tester There are more exciting things in life than unit testing SQL Statements, checking the results, timings, and execution plans. Phil... 03 November 2015 16 min read
Neeraj Tripathi SQL Server Heaps, and Their Fragmentation In SQL Server, heaps are rightly treated with suspicion. Although there are rare cases where they perform well, they are... 02 November 2015 11 min read
Laerte Junior Automating Your SQL Server Best Practice Reports: The Document If you're making a report from table-based data, an MS Word document is often a good option. In the second... 21 October 2015 10 min read
Grant Fritchey Top 10 Most Common Database Scripts What are the scripts that a working DBA uses so often that they become part of the 'muscle memory'? Grant... 15 October 2015 14 min read
Laerte Junior Automating Your SQL Server Best Practice Reports:The Checks A DBA in charge of a whole lot of databases and servers has to check regularly that there are no... 06 October 2015 13 min read
Joshua Feierman Checklists: A DBA’s Best Friend Because so much of the work of the DBA involved doing things in the right order without missing steps out,... 30 September 2015 11 min read
Artemakis Artemiou Introducing SQL Server In-Memory OLTP In-Memory OLTP, aka Hekaton, originally shipped with 2014, and although it certainly helped the performance of certain types of workload,... 30 September 2015 10 min read
Adam Aspin SQLXML Bulk Loader: The Sequel SQLXML isn't exactly new technology, and parts of it aren't pretty, but if you need to heave vast quantities of... 25 September 2015 24 min read
Phil Factor Dependencies and References in SQL Server It is important for developers and DBAs to be able to determine the interdependencies of any database object. Perhaps you... 24 September 2015 20 min read
Robert Sheldon Power Query Formula Language in Power BI Desktop The Power Query Formula Language (PQFL) is a functional language that drives the Power BI transformations, and allows you to... 21 September 2015 19 min read
Uwe Ricken 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... 09 September 2015 16 min read
Gail Shaw How to Confuse the SQL Server Query Optimizer Gail Shaw examines three common forms of generic SQL that can and will confuse the SQL Server Optimizer to the... 09 September 2015 35 min read
Dwain Camps How to Avoid Conditional JOINs in T-SQL Relational databases go out of their way to execute SQL, however bad the crimes against Codd and relational theory within... 07 September 2015 14 min read
Kathi Kellenberger T-SQL Window Functions Speed Phreakery Before SQL Server had SQL window functions, SQL Server developers had to use all manner of tricks and algorithms to... 27 August 2015 12 min read
Robert Sheldon Working with SQL Server data in Power BI Desktop What's the best way of providing self-service business intelligence (BI) to data that is held in on-premise SQL Server? Not,... 24 August 2015 24 min read
Tony Davis Basic SQL Server Performance Troubleshooting For Developers The speed of a slow SQL Query can almost always be improved. In SQL Server, the query optimizer determines the... 14 August 2015 39 min read
Robert Sheldon The Evolution of SQL Server BI It is sometimes hard to keep up with Microsoft's direction in Business Intelligence. Over the years, we've been presented with... 27 July 2015 14 min read