Robert Sheldon How to Get SQL Server Data-Conversion Horribly Wrong One of the most certain ways of going wrong with any relational database is to get data conversion wrong. Implicit... 02 April 2015 34 min read
Alex Kuznetsov Painless Refactoring of SQL Server Database Objects Refactoring a database object can often cause unexpected behavior in the code that accesses that object. In this article, adapted... 26 March 2015 25 min read
Dino Esposito Premature Scalability and the Root of All Evil When you're designing an application, there is a temptation to build it to a super-scalable future-proof architecture, even when the... 18 March 2015 13 min read
Fabiano Amorim Never Ignore a Sort Warning in SQL Server It is always bad news if your SQL queries are having to use the SORT operator. It is worse news... 18 March 2015 9 min read
Roy Ernest SQL Server Spatial Indexes Spatial Data in SQL Server has special indexing because it has to perform specialised functions. It is able, for example,... 18 March 2015 20 min read
Dennes Torres Identifying and Solving Index Scan Problems When you're developing database applications, it pays to check for index scans in the SQL Server query plan cache. Once... 10 March 2015 24 min read
Tony Davis Questions About SQL Server Transaction Log You Were Too Shy To Ask You can give a deep-dive presentation about SQL Server's transaction log, and round it off by inviting questions. Your audience... 11 February 2015 26 min read
Dennes Torres Checking the Plan Cache Warnings for a SQL Server Database How often do you check your query plans during development to see if they contain any warnings? If you're missing... 11 February 2015 10 min read
Jonathan Watts The Promise – and the Pitfalls – of In-Memory OLTP When SQL Server 2014 was released, it included Hekaton, Microsoft's much talked about memory-optimized engine that brings In-Memory OLTP into... 04 February 2015 7 min read
Michael K Campbell The Importance of Caching Performance tuning and optimization definitely have their place in minimizing SQL Server Licensing costs - by helping keep CPU utilization... 04 February 2015 15 min read
Dennes Torres Centralize Your Database Monitoring Process SQL Server Data Collector, together with Management Data Warehouse, is a fine and useful component for gathering information centrally about... 26 January 2015 17 min read
Kathi Kellenberger SQL Server Reporting Services Basics: Deploying Reports Having designed and tested our reports, it's time to deploy them to the Report Server, so that our users can... 06 January 2015 20 min read
Robert Sheldon Questions About Pivoting Data in SQL Server You Were Too Shy to Ask Of all the basic SQL operations, the pivot seems to cause the most problems. We can tell from the way... 01 January 2015 30 min read
Feodor Georgiev Data Cleaning in SQL 2012 with Data Quality Services For data to be usefully analyzed, it must be consistent, accurate, and trustworthy. When incoming data is non-uniform, duplicated records... 31 December 2014 11 min read
Dennes Torres Exploring Query Plans in SQL SQL Server keeps the most-used execution plans in cache, so it doesn't need to recompile the same queries every time.... 31 December 2014 15 min read
Kathi Kellenberger SQL Server Reporting Services Basics: The Visual Controls The challenge of report development is to present complex data in a simple, visually compelling way. The goal is to... 03 December 2014 17 min read
William Brewer Database Configuration Management for SQL Server It is not just the rapid and painless testing, deployment and update of databases that requires care in the retention... 05 November 2014 16 min read
Feodor Georgiev SSIS 2012 Projects: Setup, Project Creation and Deployment It used to be that SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) packages had to be deployed individually. Now, they can be... 04 November 2014 7 min read
Kalen Delaney Hekaton in 1000 Words The SQL Server 2014 In-Memory OLTP engine (a.k.a. Hekaton) is a radical change for relational databases. This article, an exerpt... 22 October 2014 6 min read
Scott Swanberg Exploring Your SQL Server Databases with T-SQL Most DBAs hoard their own favourite T-SQL scripts to help them with their work, often on a USB 'thumbdrive', but... 09 October 2014 40 min read
