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This article shows how to find missing rows in a table using a outer join.   Read more...

The options that you need to select when setting up an Azure Storage service account allow you to specify the durability and high-availability of your data, but they don't provide for data recovery to a point-in-time. In fact, it means that some of the bad things that can happen to data are more efficiently replicated to all copies. Backup is quite a separate issue.  Read more...

SQL Saturday is coming to Richmond on March 21, 2015. Join us for a free day of SQL Server training and networking. There are also paid-for pre-con sessions available from Tim Mitchell and Kevin Kline. Register while space is available.  Read more...

An article about how we underestimate the power of joins and degrade our query performance by not using proper joins  Read more...

Most large organizations have implemented one or more big data applications. As more data accumulates internal users and analysts execute more reports and forecasts, which leads to additional queries and analysis, and more reporting. The cycle continues: data growth leads to better analysis, which generates more reporting. Eventually the big data application swells with so much data and querying that performance suffers.   Read more...

Could you spare 3 minutes to do us a quick favor? Redgate’s running this short survey on how our readers develop and deploy databases. It’s just 12 multiple choice questions, so if you’ve got a couple of minutes to spare, we’d love to hear from you.  Read more...

This level introduces of you to the fundamentals of columnstore indexes, introdused in SQL Server 2012 to manage the indexing of very large tables.  Read more...

When you can’t get to your data because another application has it locked, a thorough knowledge of SQL Server concurrency will give you the confidence to decide what to do.  Read more...

A database must be able to maintain and enforce the business rules and relationships in data in order to maintain the data model. It does this through referential constraints. They aren't complex, but are powerful, especially with the means to attach DRI actions to them. Joe Celko explains all, and pines for the ANSI CREATE ASSERTION statement.  Read more...

PowerShell V2 introduces the "try-catch-finally" statements, similar to those you already use when you write .NET code. "Try-catch-finally" encloses a block of script that is likely to produce errors under specific circumstances and therefore helps you to keep your code organized. This article is a short usage guide for this error handling construct.   Read more...