Omid Afzalalghom Doing a SQL Server Healthcheck via PowerShell PowerShell is an ideal tool for doing health checks of a collection of SQL Server instances, and there are several... 16 November 2015 13 min read
Enrico van de Laar The SQL Server 2016 Query Store: Overview and Architecture SQL Server's Query Store, introduced in SQL Server 2016, helps to troubleshoot query performance by capturing a range of information... 16 November 2015 14 min read
Edward Elliott SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) and Database References SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) provides, via the DacPac, interesting support for verifying not only those references within the database,... 16 November 2015 12 min read
Neeraj Tripathi SQL Server Heaps, and Their Fragmentation In SQL Server, heaps are rightly treated with suspicion. Although there are rare cases where they perform well, they are... 02 November 2015 11 min read
Laerte Junior Automating Your SQL Server Best Practice Reports: The Document If you're making a report from table-based data, an MS Word document is often a good option. In the second... 21 October 2015 10 min read
Grant Fritchey Top 10 Most Common Database Scripts What are the scripts that a working DBA uses so often that they become part of the 'muscle memory'? Grant... 15 October 2015 14 min read
Laerte Junior Automating Your SQL Server Best Practice Reports:The Checks A DBA in charge of a whole lot of databases and servers has to check regularly that there are no... 06 October 2015 13 min read
Artemakis Artemiou Introducing SQL Server In-Memory OLTP In-Memory OLTP, aka Hekaton, originally shipped with 2014, and although it certainly helped the performance of certain types of workload,... 30 September 2015 10 min read
Adam Aspin SQLXML Bulk Loader: The Sequel SQLXML isn't exactly new technology, and parts of it aren't pretty, but if you need to heave vast quantities of... 25 September 2015 24 min read
Phil Factor Dependencies and References in SQL Server It is important for developers and DBAs to be able to determine the interdependencies of any database object. Perhaps you... 24 September 2015 20 min read
Uwe Ricken How Forwarded Records are Read and Processed in a SQL Server Heap Before you deliberately use a heap in SQL Server rather than a table, it is worth understanding why a heap... 09 September 2015 16 min read
Gail Shaw How to Confuse the SQL Server Query Optimizer Gail Shaw examines three common forms of generic SQL that can and will confuse the SQL Server Optimizer to the... 09 September 2015 35 min read
Kathi Kellenberger T-SQL Window Functions Speed Phreakery Before SQL Server had SQL window functions, SQL Server developers had to use all manner of tricks and algorithms to... 27 August 2015 12 min read
Robert Sheldon Working with SQL Server data in Power BI Desktop What's the best way of providing self-service business intelligence (BI) to data that is held in on-premise SQL Server? Not,... 24 August 2015 24 min read
Tony Davis Basic SQL Server Performance Troubleshooting For Developers The speed of a slow SQL Query can almost always be improved. In SQL Server, the query optimizer determines the... 14 August 2015 39 min read
Robert Sheldon The Evolution of SQL Server BI It is sometimes hard to keep up with Microsoft's direction in Business Intelligence. Over the years, we've been presented with... 27 July 2015 14 min read
Nicolas Prigent PowerShell Day-to-Day Admin Tasks: Monitoring Performance By reading performance counters from services such as SQL Server or Exchange, you can get a wealth of performance information.... 01 July 2015 13 min read
Robert Sheldon How to Get NULLs Horribly Wrong in SQL Server NULLs in SQL are a mixed blessing. The Three-Valued Logic of SQL has its uses but can cause difficulties to... 25 June 2015 36 min read
Adam Aspin SQLXML Bulk Loader Basics SQLXML isn't exactly new technology, but like the even more venerable BCP, it remains the quickest and most reliable way... 02 June 2015 26 min read
Alex Kuznetsov Reusing T-SQL Code Database programmers are often caught in the paradox of wanting to implement business rules and complex functionality in one place... 28 May 2015 27 min read