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
Dwain Camps Self-maintaining, Contiguous Effective Dates in Temporal Tables 'Temporal' tables contain facts that are valid for a period of time. When they are used for financial information they... 10 March 2015 38 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
Robert Sheldon How to get Database Design Horribly Wrong Database Design is one of those tasks where you have to carefully get all the major aspects right. If you... 06 March 2015 34 min read
Seb Rose What is Behaviour Driven (Database) Development? Behaviour Driven Development is not always clearly understood, and the term is particularly unfamiliar in database circles. Seb Rose introduces... 05 March 2015 16 min read
Thomas LeBlanc Defusing Database Time Bombs: Avoiding the Need to Refactor Databases Where applications are evolved by gradually molding them to a growing understanding of the business domain, this presents great challenges... 27 February 2015 23 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
Joe Celko The DRI Subject of References A database must be able to maintain and enforce the business rules and relationships in data in order to maintain... 11 February 2015 13 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
Feodor Georgiev Curing Data-Obesity in OLTP Databases OLTP databases work best when data that becomes no longer current is then transferred to a separate database for analysis... 06 February 2015 13 min read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
Tim Hidalgo Managing Test Data as a Database CI Component – Part 1 Constructing a test environment for your databases can be a difficult task at the best of times. Once you've actually... 03 February 2015 20 min read
Dwain Camps Bowled Over by SQL Window Functions What better way to learn how to construct complex CHECK CONSTRAINTs, use the SQL 2012 window frame capability of the... 26 January 2015 27 min read
Robert Sheldon Questions About T-SQL Control-of-Flow Language You Were Too Shy to Ask Surely, we all know how T-SQL Control-of-flow language works? In fact it is surprisingly easy to get caught out. What,... 26 January 2015 29 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
Phil Factor A Start with Automating Database Configuration Management For a number of reasons, it pays to have the up-to-date source of all the databases and servers that you're... 16 January 2015 24 min read
AWS Robert Sheldon in AWS Amazon’s Aurora: A Distributed SQL Database Alternative For MySQL Applications SQL-based distributed Cloud Relational databases aren't new, but Amazon's Aurora offers an alternative to SQL Azure, and, being MySQL-compatible, provides... 15 January 2015 13 min read
Grant Fritchey Why Developers Need to Understand Execution Plans As a coder, the more you know about the business, the better code you're going to write. The more you... 12 January 2015 30 min read
