Uwe Ricken How Forwarded Records are Read and Processed in a SQL Server Heap Before you deliberately use a heap in SQL Server rather than a table, it is worth understanding why a heap... 09 September 2015 16 min read
Gail Shaw How to Confuse the SQL Server Query Optimizer Gail Shaw examines three common forms of generic SQL that can and will confuse the SQL Server Optimizer to the... 09 September 2015 35 min read
Dwain Camps SQL Conditional JOIN: Why It’s Slow & What to Use Instead Learn why conditional JOINs using CASE in the ON clause cause poor SQL Server performance. Compare alternatives: LEFT OUTER JOIN... 07 September 2015 14 min read
Kathi Kellenberger T-SQL Window Functions Speed Phreakery Before SQL Server had SQL window functions, SQL Server developers had to use all manner of tricks and algorithms to... 27 August 2015 12 min read
Robert Sheldon Working with SQL Server data in Power BI Desktop What's the best way of providing self-service business intelligence (BI) to data that is held in on-premise SQL Server? Not,... 24 August 2015 24 min read
Tony Davis Basic SQL Server Performance Troubleshooting For Developers The speed of a slow SQL Query can almost always be improved. In SQL Server, the query optimizer determines the... 14 August 2015 39 min read
Robert Sheldon The Evolution of SQL Server BI It is sometimes hard to keep up with Microsoft's direction in Business Intelligence. Over the years, we've been presented with... 27 July 2015 14 min read
Edward Elliott Non-Breaking Online Database Deployments For an experienced database developer, the idea of doing non-breaking database deployments while the database is still online holds respect... 21 July 2015 11 min read
Joe Celko SQL Style Habits: Attack of the Skeuomorphs Although we like to think that our programming techniques are progressive and in tune with the bleeding edge of software... 14 July 2015 13 min read
Nicolas Prigent PowerShell Day-to-Day Admin Tasks: Monitoring Performance By reading performance counters from services such as SQL Server or Exchange, you can get a wealth of performance information.... 01 July 2015 13 min read
Robert Sheldon How to Get NULLs Horribly Wrong in SQL Server NULLs in SQL are a mixed blessing. The Three-Valued Logic of SQL has its uses but can cause difficulties to... 25 June 2015 36 min read
Adam Aspin SQLXML Bulk Loader Basics SQLXML isn't exactly new technology, but like the even more venerable BCP, it remains the quickest and most reliable way... 02 June 2015 26 min read
Feodor Georgiev Using R to Explore Data by Analysis – for SQL Professionals What's the best way for a SQL programmer to learn about R? It's probably by trying out various experiments with... 02 June 2015 17 min read
Alex Kuznetsov Reusing T-SQL Code Database programmers are often caught in the paradox of wanting to implement business rules and complex functionality in one place... 28 May 2015 27 min read
Tim Hidalgo Managing Test Data as a Database CI Component – Part 2 Once you're clear about what data the developers and testers need to be able to be effective, you have several... 28 May 2015 10 min read
Robert Sheldon SQL Server Dates and Times: Ten Common Failures from DATETIME to DATEDIFF Ten common failures developers make with SQL Server date and time handling: DATETIME vs DATETIME2 precision, string-format assumptions, regional date... 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
T-SQL Programming Dennes Torres in T-SQL Programming SQL Server Batch Process Optimization: Auto-Growth, Locks, Log Flushes, and Index Fragmentation Step-by-step performance tuning of a SQL Server batch process - identifying and fixing auto-growth events, lock contention, WRITELOG waits, index... 08 May 2015 33 min read
Phil Factor Documenting a SQL Server Database: Extended Properties, YAML Headers, and Publishing Strategies Comprehensive guide to documenting a SQL Server database: where to keep documentation, what standards exist (XML, JSON, YAML), how to... 06 May 2015 27 min read
