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
Annette Allen SSIS Basics: Using the Execute SQL Task to Generate Result Sets The Execute SQL Task of SSIS is extraordinarily useful, but it can cause a lot of difficulty for developers learning... 23 October 2012 14 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
Robert Sheldon Report Builder 3.0: Adding Charts to Your Report Charts are one of the commonest ways of visualizing reports from data. Report Builder provides a way of generating charts... 11 October 2012 13 min read
Louis Davidson Tim Ford Tune Your Indexing Strategy with SQL Server DMVs SQL Server Indexes need to be effective. It is wrong to have too few or too many. The ones you... 11 October 2012 42 min read
Michael Sorens Database Source Control Basics: Getting Started It makes a lot of sense to do it, but how do you get started? Whatever you use to build... 09 October 2012 17 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
Joe Celko Matrix Math in SQL Relational Databases have tables as data structures, not arrays. This makes it tricky and slow to do matrix operations, but... 17 September 2012 10 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
Dave Green Ten Things I Wish I’d Known When I Started Using tSQLt and SQL Test The open-source Unit Test framework tSQLt is a great way of writing unit tests in the same language as the... 11 September 2012 12 min read
Phil Factor Registered Servers and Central Management Server Stores SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) has many features that make it particularly convenient for the database developer and DBA. Registered... 28 August 2012 14 min read
Robert Sheldon Report Builder 3.0: Creating a Basic Report Report Builder is underrated as a BI and report-authoring tool. It is a free stand-alone application from Microsoft that provides... 24 August 2012 18 min read
