Brad McGehee Rebuilding Indexes using the SSMS Database Maintenance Wizard Index fragmentation can cause problems with query performance. Indexes therefore need to be occasionally rebuilt. the Rebuild Index task of... 18 August 2010 24 min read
Joe Celko The DIS-Information Principle: A Splitting Headache You can easily re-factor bad DML code, but if a database design is wrong, you can do little to rescue... 17 August 2010 10 min read
Louis Davidson Tim Ford DMVs for Query Plan Metadata Before you can tackle any performance issues with a working database, you need to know which queries to work on... 17 August 2010 57 min read
Mike Mooney When Database Source Control Goes Bad It is a question every development manager dreads; "So how does your company handle database changes?". The reply usually masks... 05 August 2010 25 min read
Joe Celko VALUES() and Long Parameter Lists To make progress as a relational Database programmer, you have to think in terms of sets, rather than lists, arrays... 22 July 2010 11 min read
Brad McGehee Automate and Improve Your Database Maintenance Using Ola Hallengren’s Free Script If you ever feel uneasy when you set about handcrafting database maintenance jobs for SQL Server, it may be the... 20 July 2010 35 min read
Richard Morris Tom Kyte: Geek of the Week Tom Kyte's contribution to the AskTom column and site over ten years has been outstanding. Much of what he says... 24 June 2010 20 min read
Jeremy Jarrell Multi-Tier Performance Tuning with ANTS Performance Profiler 6 When you are developing a database application that, by its very nature, suffers from I/O bottlenecks, you need to get... 23 June 2010 7 min read
Alex Kuznetsov Developing Modifications that Survive Concurrency You can create a database under the assumption that SQL looks after all the problems of concurrency. It will probably... 22 June 2010 40 min read
Josef Richberg SSIS and Parallelism: The Unseen Minions Sometimes, a procedural database process cannot easily be reduced to a set-based algorithm in order to reduce the time it... 10 June 2010 19 min read
Joe Celko Book Review: Defensive Database Programming With SQL Server It distils a great deal of practical experience; the writing of it was a considerable task; It packs in a... 10 June 2010 4 min read
Neil Hobson Exchange 2010 DAG Creation and Configuration Part 1 If you're using Exchange 2010, then you're probably interested in using the new Database Availability Group feature for your High... 07 June 2010 13 min read
Kathi Kellenberger Set-based Speed Phreakery: The FIFO Stock Inventory SQL Problem The SQL Speed Freak Challenge is a no-holds-barred competition to find the fastest way in SQL Server to perform a... 25 May 2010 31 min read
Rod Colledge Reliable Storage Systems for SQL Server By validating the IO path before commissioning the production database system, and performing ongoing validation through page checksums and DBCC... 12 May 2010 12 min read
Phil Factor Exploring SQL Server table metadata with SSMS and TSQL Phil shows how to start squeezing powerful magic from SSMS for doing a detailed exploration of the metadata of your... 29 April 2010 21 min read
Jonathan Lewis Oracle to SQL Server: Crossing the Great Divide, Part 1 When a SQL expert moves from Oracle to SQL Server, he can spot obvious strengths and weaknesses in the product... 28 April 2010 23 min read
Rodney Landrum Consolidating SQL Server Error Logs from Multiple Instances Using SSIS SQL Server hides a lot of very useful information in its error log files. Unfortunately, the process of hunting through... 14 April 2010 15 min read
Alex Kuznetsov Basic Defensive Database Programming Techniques We can all recognise good-quality database code: It doesn't break with every change in the server's configuration, or on upgrade.... 31 March 2010 36 min read
Joe Celko Celko’s SQL Stumper: Eggs in one Basket Joe Celko reveals the winner of his Easter Stumper: the puzzle of designing an apparently simple database to deal with... 29 March 2010 13 min read
Buck Woody Mission Critical: Database Design There is nothing like a checklist to make sure you've completed all the tasks in designing a database, and there... 18 March 2010 3 min read
