Last Friday I appeared in the middle of a Brazilian Twitch live made by a friend and while they were talking and studying, I provided some links full of content to them. Nowadays, there are a lot of free content on internet. Not only free content, but also content well organized in a good sequence … Read more
In my last blog, I built some Powershell to take a graph that I had modelled and bring that into SQL Server in a format that could be imported into SQL Server node and edge tables. I have started on a tool to take that imported data and create a set of graph tables to … Read more
SQL Server tech interview questions must be well crafted to make sure the candidate actually knows the topic. In this article, Sergey Gigoyan provides his favorite questions for interviewing SQL Server developers.… Read more
When inserting rows into a heap, SQL Server must sometimes update the PFS page which can PFS contention and affect performance. In this article, Uwe Ricken demonstrates how to measure PFS contention.… Read more
SSDT (SQL Server Data Tools) is really great to manage database schema changes. However, due to a disappeared feature, SSDT can make you go mad very easily. The schema compare has a lot of configurations. A really lot of configurations. You start the schema compare using the right-click on the SSDT project. Before starting the … Read more
Temporary tables are used by every DB developer, but they're not likely to be too adventurous with their use, or exploit all their advantages. They can improve your code's performance and maintainability, but can be the source of grief to both developer and DBA if things go wrong and a process grinds away inexorably slowly. We asked Phil for advice, thinking that it would be a simple explanation.… Read more
I am in the middle of a project to enable our corporate databases to work with continuous integration using RedGate SQL Automation (and hopefully get a few blogs/articles out of it too.) One of the things that the tool does is create your database in multiple ways, with multiple names, in order to compare to … Read more
When I read the list of new features in SQL Server 2019 I became very proud of my crystal ball powers. In July 2017 I published an article about Graph Database feature in SQL Server 2017. In this article, besides showing the improvements and benefits I also highlighted one problem: the lack of graph edge … Read more
Note: This is an update of a blog I posted in 2006 with a lot of additional information (I was less wordy in my 30s apparently). It is just as relevant today. I have a presentation I do occasionally on concurrency entitled “Let Me Finish” that covers many of the different types of concurrency behaviors … Read more
SQL Server replication works well on a low latency, high bandwidth network. When actual networks have high latency or limited bandwidth, problems may occur. Such conditions can be emulated with hardware or software tools. You can quickly set up a test environment to emulate high latency and limited bandwidth by using free, open source software. … Read more
In this book Kalen Delaney introduces and explains how the 2016 In-Memory OLTP engine works. The Hekaton internals knowledge offered in this book will help you migrate existing tables or databases to Hekaton, and get faster performance from your SQL Server applications than you ever thought possible.… Read more
Every SQL Server Database programmer needs to be familiar with the System Functions. These range from the sublime (such as @@rowcount or @@identity) to the ridiculous (IsNumeric()) Robert Sheldon provides an overview of the most commonly used of them.… Read more
The SQL Server 2016 Query Store can give you valuable performance insights by providing several new ways of troubleshooting queries, studying their plans, exploring their context settings, and checking their performance metrics. However, it can also directly affect the performance of queries by forcing Execution Plans for specific queries.… Read more
As well as its multidimensional model, SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) now has a tabular model of database that either runs in-memory or in DirectQuery mode. The in-memory analytics engine allows the users of Excel or Power View to base reports on tabular model objects. Having shown how to handle date-based information using the Multi-dimensional model, Dennes now turns his attention on the in-memory tabular model.… Read more
To be able to make full use of the system catalog to find out more about a database, you need to be familiar with the metadata functions. They save a great deal of time and typing when querying the metadata. Once you get the hang of these functions, the system catalog suddenly seems simple to use, as Robert Sheldon demonstrates in this article.… Read more
When your SQL Server database is set to have its statistics automatically updated, you will probably conclude that, whenever the distribution statistics are out-of-date, they will be updated before the next query is executed against that index or table. Curiously, this isn't always the case. What actually happens is that the statistics only gets updated if needed by the query optimiser to determine an effective query plan.… Read more
A walk-through can be a great help to understanding SQL Server Analysis Services, especially when it solves the problem of providing an effective date dimension to a cube. Dennes takes Adventureworks, and demonstrates all the twists and turns of creating a cube that provides meaningful historical information.… Read more
Azure SQL Data Warehouse is a fully-managed and scalable cloud service. It is still in preview, but solid. Not only is it compatible with several other Azure offerings, such as Machine Learning and Data Factory, but also with various existing SQL Server tools and Microsoft products. It talks Power BI. Are we now seeing the final piece of the Azure jigsaw fall into place?… Read more
SQL Server instances are generally poorly-documented. How easily can you tell if something has changed? How easily can you check that there is adequate space for growth? Are you up-to-date with licenses? What errors are happening? Who has accessing the system? Before PowerShell, it was difficult to be on top of all this. Now you can, with the help of Sander's database documenter.… Read more
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