Dwain Camps Self-maintaining, Contiguous Effective Dates in Temporal Tables 'Temporal' tables contain facts that are valid for a period of time. When they are used for financial information they... 10 March 2015 38 min read
Dennes Torres Identifying and Solving Index Scan Problems When you're developing database applications, it pays to check for index scans in the SQL Server query plan cache. Once... 10 March 2015 24 min read
Robert Sheldon How to get Database Design Horribly Wrong Database Design is one of those tasks where you have to carefully get all the major aspects right. If you... 06 March 2015 34 min read
Thomas LeBlanc Defusing Database Time Bombs: Avoiding the Need to Refactor Databases Where applications are evolved by gradually molding them to a growing understanding of the business domain, this presents great challenges... 27 February 2015 23 min read
Tony Davis Questions About SQL Server Transaction Log You Were Too Shy To Ask You can give a deep-dive presentation about SQL Server's transaction log, and round it off by inviting questions. Your audience... 11 February 2015 26 min read
Joe Celko The DRI Subject of References A database must be able to maintain and enforce the business rules and relationships in data in order to maintain... 11 February 2015 13 min read
Dennes Torres Checking the Plan Cache Warnings for a SQL Server Database How often do you check your query plans during development to see if they contain any warnings? If you're missing... 11 February 2015 10 min read
Feodor Georgiev Curing Data-Obesity in OLTP Databases OLTP databases work best when data that becomes no longer current is then transferred to a separate database for analysis... 06 February 2015 13 min read
Jonathan Watts The Promise – and the Pitfalls – of In-Memory OLTP When SQL Server 2014 was released, it included Hekaton, Microsoft's much talked about memory-optimized engine that brings In-Memory OLTP into... 04 February 2015 7 min read
Michael K Campbell The Importance of Caching Performance tuning and optimization definitely have their place in minimizing SQL Server Licensing costs - by helping keep CPU utilization... 04 February 2015 15 min read
Dennes Torres Centralize Your Database Monitoring Process SQL Server Data Collector, together with Management Data Warehouse, is a fine and useful component for gathering information centrally about... 26 January 2015 17 min read
Dwain Camps Bowled Over by SQL Window Functions What better way to learn how to construct complex CHECK CONSTRAINTs, use the SQL 2012 window frame capability of the... 26 January 2015 27 min read
Robert Sheldon Questions About T-SQL Control-of-Flow Language You Were Too Shy to Ask Surely, we all know how T-SQL Control-of-flow language works? In fact it is surprisingly easy to get caught out. What,... 26 January 2015 29 min read
Phil Factor A Start with Automating Database Configuration Management For a number of reasons, it pays to have the up-to-date source of all the databases and servers that you're... 16 January 2015 24 min read
Grant Fritchey Why Developers Need to Understand Execution Plans As a coder, the more you know about the business, the better code you're going to write. The more you... 12 January 2015 30 min read
Feodor Georgiev How to get ETL Horribly Wrong ETL ( Extract, transform, load) doesn't have to be like a spell on hell. To make a success of ETL... 09 January 2015 14 min read
Kathi Kellenberger SQL Server Reporting Services Basics: Deploying Reports Having designed and tested our reports, it's time to deploy them to the Report Server, so that our users can... 06 January 2015 20 min read
Joe Celko Discrete and Continuous data in SQL Not all data is discrete; some data types represent a continuum. In SQL, we have to approximate them and live... 06 January 2015 17 min read
Robert Sheldon Questions About Pivoting Data in SQL Server You Were Too Shy to Ask Of all the basic SQL operations, the pivot seems to cause the most problems. We can tell from the way... 01 January 2015 30 min read
Feodor Georgiev Data Cleaning in SQL 2012 with Data Quality Services For data to be usefully analyzed, it must be consistent, accurate, and trustworthy. When incoming data is non-uniform, duplicated records... 31 December 2014 11 min read
