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
Feodor Georgiev How to get ETL Horribly Wrong ETL ( Extract, transform, load) doesn't have to be like a spell on hell. To make a success of ETL... 09 January 2015 14 min read
Matt Hilbert Going to Extremes to Release Bug Fixes and New Features XP is no general panacea; but for the right team, and for a product that needs to release bug fixes... 06 January 2015 6 min read
Joe Celko Discrete and Continuous data in SQL Not all data is discrete; some data types represent a continuum. In SQL, we have to approximate them and live... 06 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
Dwain Camps Archiving Hierarchical, Deleted Transactions Using XML When you delete a business transaction from the database, there are times when you might want to keep a record... 30 December 2014 18 min read
Jonathan Lewis Execution Plans Part 11: Actuals So far in this series we’ve talked about interpreting the shape of an execution plan and understanding the meaning of... 17 December 2014 13 min read
Jon Smith Using Entity Framework with an Existing Database: User Interface Pre-existing databases can pose some difficulties for software developers using an ORM. To demonstrate ways of circumventing them, Jon Smith... 16 December 2014 24 min read
Joshua Feierman High Availability and Disaster Recovery for Small Businesses Too often in the past , High Availability and Disaster Recovery have been marketed as expensive choices for businesses with... 16 December 2014 13 min read
