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
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
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
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
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
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
Gail Shaw Gail Shaw’s SQL Server Howlers For the latest in our series of SQL Server Howlers, we asked Gail Shaw which common SQL Server mistakes and... 14 August 2012 22 min read
Dave Ballantyne Cleaning Up SQL Server Deployment Scripts Although, generally speaking, source control is the truth, a database doesn't quite conform to the ideal because the target schema... 02 August 2012 22 min read
Phil Factor PowerShell SMO for SQL Server: Running Scripts and Reports Across Multiple Databases and Servers Using PowerShell SMO (SQL Server Management Objects) to run scripts, collect reports, and automate DBA tasks across multiple databases and... 19 July 2012 27 min read
Jonathan Kehayias Optimizing tempdb configuration with SQL Server 2012 Extended Events One of the most obvious bottlenecks in the performance of tempdb is caused by PAGELATCH, in-memory latch contention on the... 13 July 2012 20 min read
Warwick Rudd TDE with SQL Server AlwaysOn: Certificate Propagation to Availability Replicas Configure Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) on SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Databases. Covers creating the master key, certificate, and database encryption... 04 July 2012 8 min read
Laerte Junior The PoSh DBA – The Attributes of Advanced Functions Once you pass that point of just hurriedly writing PowerShell scripts for immediate use and start to write PowerShell functions... 19 June 2012 18 min read
Alex Kuznetsov Developing Low-Maintenance Databases Alex's team of developers are geared to doing rapid development of database applications in a busy corporate setting, yet take... 12 June 2012 21 min read
Peter Larsson The Road to Professional Database Development: Database Normalization Not only is the process of normalisation valuable for increasing data quality and simplifying the process of modifying data, but... 07 June 2012 27 min read
