Most advice you see online about heaps is to avoid them. In this article, Uwe Ricken describes the basics of heaps so that you can determine when heaps are the best choice. … Read more
Microsoft introduced Columnstore with SQL Server 2012 and have improved the feature in every version since then. You may be wondering why they are different than traditional indexes and how they work. In this series, Edward Pollack explains the architecture of Columnstore indexes. In future articles in the series, he will describe best practices for Columnstore.… Read more
This marks the third year that Redgate have launched a survey to better understand how organisations monitor their databases. This year, 971 database professionals from around the world responded. Here are some of the key insights from the survey: Estates are growing more than ever Companies who reported over 1,000 SQL Server instances grew 9% … Read more
PowerShell scripts are the tool of choice for many admins, but how do you make them easy for others to use? In this article, Greg Moore shows how to add professional looking help to your scripts that work just like the help in cmdlets. … Read more
In the third article of this series, Sanil Mhatre demonstrates how to perform a sentiment analysis using R including generating a word cloud, word associations, sentiment scores, and emotion classification. … Read more
When the optimizer doesn’t estimate the correct amount of memory for a query, either memory is wasted that could be used for other processes or some operations will spill to disk. Microsoft has added Memory Grant Feedback to help overcome this issue. In this article, Greg Larsen explains what you need to know about this new feature. … Read more
For any Business Intelligence solution to be useful for analytical and decision-making purposes, it is imperative that the underlying data quality is good so, that reports generated are reliable to make business decisions. This article from Imran Quadri Syed walks the through steps involved to implement a successful Data Quality Monitoring framework that would validate incoming data against predefined data quality rules and capture data quality metrics.… Read more
In this article of the series, Robert Sheldon discuses emerging trends in storage like virtual SANs, intelligent storage, computational storage and storage-class memory.… Read more
In the third and final article of the series, Shel Burkow demonstrates several designs that cover many-to-many relationships, attribute closure, and solution space with Cassandra tables.… Read more
Because of its many roles, tempdb is the source of performance issues in SQL Server, and there are recommended configuration changes to mitigate this. In this article, Fabiano Amorim demonstrates another issue with tempdb performance that you probably didn’t know about. … Read more
Replication is one way to copy data to another database or server. In this article, Pamela Mooney describes how to set Transactional Replication.… Read more
Dr. Codd proposed the normalization rules we used to design databases, but did you know that he also came up with rules that vendors must meet to call their products relational database systems? In this article, Joe Celko explains the thirteen RDBMS rules.… Read more
In this article in the series, Robert Sheldon explains the differences between direct-attached storage, network-attached storage, and storage area networks.… Read more
Views in SQL Server are used to simplify writing queries and managing security, but’s it’s easy for views to eventually get out of sync with the underlying tables. In this article, Edward Pollack shows how to overcome this problem. … Read more
Microsoft introduced several features called Intelligent Query Processing for SQL Server in 2017 and 2019 that can improve performance without making changes to code. In this article, Greg Larsen demonstrates the feature Batch Mode on Rowstore. … Read more
The term DevOps was coined in the early 2000s to improve the speed and resiliency of the delivery of features and applications and providing more value to customers. It’s not about any particular technology, methodology, or toolset, but automation of everything from unit testing to building environments to delivery is part of it. DevOps also … Read more
Despite some humorous examples of deployments gone wrong, failures are not funny. William Brewer explains why staging is so important and how it can help avoid the types of disasters he recalls in this article.… Read more
Today, most organization are using solid-state drives for everything from laptops to enterprise database storage and virtual machines. In this article, Robert Sheldon explains how NAND flash solid-state drives work.… Read more
Smart DBAs automate tasks whenever possible. In this article, Greg Moore shows the need to use caution when using undocumented procedures for automating tasks, and that PowerShell may have what you need instead. … Read more
You’ll need several tools in place to effectively work with SQL Server in Linux. In this article, Robert Cain explains how to install these tools in your Ubuntu virtual machine. … Read more
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