Robert Sheldon How to Get SQL Server Dates and Times Horribly Wrong One of the times that you need things to go right is when you are doing analysis and reporting. This... 28 May 2015 35 min read
Nicolas Prigent PowerShell Day-to-Day Admin Tasks: WMI, CIM and PSWA WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) is the basic way of querying and changing basic information about any windows server, including SQL... 28 May 2015 12 min read
Dwain Camps Using the T-SQL PERCENTILE Analytic Functions in SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008 Percentiles give meaning to measurements by telling you the percentage of the population being measured who get higher or lower... 18 May 2015 27 min read
Dennes Torres Optimizing Batch Process in SQL Server SQL Server batch processes are usually run from SQL Agent in background. They can take significant time and resources, especially... 08 May 2015 32 min read
Phil Factor Documenting your SQL Server Database One of the shocks that a developer can get when starting to program in T-SQL is that there is no... 06 May 2015 27 min read
Robert Sheldon How to Get SQL Server Security Horribly Wrong It is no good doing some or most of the aspects of SQL Server security right. You have to get... 29 April 2015 24 min read
Feodor Georgiev Making Data Analytics Simpler: SQL Server and R R and SQL Server are a match made in heaven. You don't need anything special to get started beyond the... 28 April 2015 13 min read
Adam Aspin Mobile BI with SQL Server Reporting Services For users to get the information they need from mobile reports, we frequently have to tailor the way we design... 15 April 2015 30 min read
Grahaeme Ross Understanding Cross-Database Transactions in SQL Server Microsoft 'Always On' technology does not support distributed or cross-database transactions. Why not? Grahaeme Ross shows how to investigate cross-database... 11 April 2015 19 min read
Phil Factor Schema-Based Access Control for SQL Server Databases Access-control within the database is important for the security of data, but it should be simple to implement. It is... 09 April 2015 25 min read
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
