Robert Sheldon Report Building 3.0: Adding Maps to Your Reports With Report Builder and SSMS, there isn't much you can't do in the way of the common reports and visualisations.... 13 November 2012 17 min read
Feodor Georgiev How come the Hourglass? Why database applications slow down It is frustrating when you hit 'submit' and you get the hourglass big-time. Is it the database to blame? It... 10 November 2012 12 min read
Joe Sack Fixing Gatekeeper Row Cardinality Estimate Issues The Query Optimiser needs a good estimate of the number of rows likely to be returned by each physical operator... 01 November 2012 18 min read
William Brewer Database Deployment Cribsheet As part of our long-running Cribsheet series, we asked William to write a guide to deployment that described in general... 29 October 2012 14 min read
Database Administration Seth Delconte in Database Administration SQL Server XML: Creating, Shredding, and Combining XML Data with T-SQL Manipulate XML data in SQL Server using T-SQL: create XML from tables with FOR XML, shred XML to rows with... 23 October 2012 14 min read
Annette Allen SSIS Basics: Using the Execute SQL Task to Generate Result Sets The Execute SQL Task of SSIS is extraordinarily useful, but it can cause a lot of difficulty for developers learning... 23 October 2012 14 min read
Dmitri Korotkevitch Partitioned Tables, Indexes and Execution Plans: a Cautionary Tale Table partitioning is a blessing in that it makes large tables that have varying access patterns more scalable and manageable,... 23 October 2012 20 min read
Book Discussion Brad McGehee in Book Discussion Book Review: Troubleshooting SQL Server: A Guide for the Accidental DBA by Jonathan Kehayias and Ted Kreuger Experienced DBAs have a wealth of experience to rely on when it's time to troubleshoot a problem, but it can... 22 October 2012 11 min read
Tony Davis SQL Server Transaction Log Management by Tony Davis and Gail Shaw When things go wrong, a DBA's reputation depends on an understanding of the transaction log, both what it does, and... 16 October 2012 2 min read
Sven Aelterman Jacob Sebastian The Art of SQL Server FILESTREAM by Jacob Sebastian and Sven Aelterman FILESTREAM is implemented as an extension to the VARBINARY(MAX) data type and allows large object data to be stored in... 16 October 2012 2 min read
Feodor Georgiev Designing Databases for Rapid Resilience As the volume of data increases, DBAs need to plan more actively for rapid restores in the event of failure.... 15 October 2012 12 min read
Robert Sheldon Book Review: Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Bible A broad topic requires a thick book. the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Bible is the work of several authors and... 12 October 2012 9 min read
Robert Sheldon Report Builder 3.0: Adding Charts to Your Report Charts are one of the commonest ways of visualizing reports from data. Report Builder provides a way of generating charts... 11 October 2012 13 min read
SQL Server Louis Davidson Tim Ford in SQL Server SQL Server Index Tuning with DMVs: sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats, Missing Index Details, and Operational Stats Using SQL Server DMVs to tune your indexing strategy - identifying unused indexes (sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats), finding operational hotspots including latching and... 11 October 2012 43 min read
Michael Sorens Database Source Control Basics: Getting Started It makes a lot of sense to do it, but how do you get started? Whatever you use to build... 09 October 2012 17 min read
Joe Sack Exploring Semantic Search Key Term Relevance SQL Server's 'Semantic Search' feature seemed an exciting feature when first shown. Was it really true that Microsoft had come... 09 October 2012 7 min read
Kalen Delaney SQL Server Concurrency: Locking, Blocking and Row Versioning Your application can have impeachable indexes and queries, but they won't help you if you can't get to your data... 02 October 2012 2 min read
Joe Celko Book Review: SQL and Relational Theory by C. J. Date SQL and Relational Theory, by Chris Date, isn't likely to be a book that SQL's greatest defender, Joe Celko, would... 26 September 2012 10 min read
Brad McGehee Book Review: SQL Server Hardware by Glenn Berry Brad finds Glenn Berry's 'SQL Server Hardware' book to be a valuable reference, not so much for the actual hardware... 25 September 2012 9 min read
Seth Delconte Getting Started With XML Indexes XML Indexes make a huge difference to the speed of XML queries, as Seth Delconte explains; and demonstrates by running... 25 September 2012 17 min read
