Like other mainstream commercial database systems, SQL Server supports analytic functions in Transact-SQL to depict complex analytical tasks. With the help of these analytic functions, we can perform common analyses, such as ranking, percentiles, moving averages and cumulative sums that can be expressed concisely in a single SQL statement.

The… Read more

SQL Server 2012 introduces Database Recovery Advisor that provides significant user experience improvements to the ways DBAs can restore databases with SQL Server Management Studio. As we know, SQL Server provides a variety of backup types, so creating the proper recovery sequence for each point in time can be tricky… Read more

As the name implies, logon triggers fire in response to the logon event that is raised when a user sessions is being established. The logon triggers can be used to audit and control server sessions, such as tracking the login activity, restricting logins to SQL Server, or limiting or denying… Read more

Indexes are the solution to many performance problems, but with too many indexes on tables can hurt the performance of your database. This is because SQL Server performs extra work in order keep these indexes up-to-date during insert/update/delete operations against tables where these indexes exist. This means that the SQL… Read more

In my last article “Introduction to Windows Azure SQL Database Services (Part 1)“, I’ve provided an overview of Microsoft Windows Azure SQL database, which is a cloud-based relational database platform that is built on SQL Server technologies. We also learned about the steps on how to provision and… Read more

Microsoft SQL Server provides a variety of different options to monitor deadlocks. This includes Trace flags 1204 and 1222, SQL Profiler trace events, Extended Events and Event Notifications. Of these options Extended Events are the most efficient, lowest impact method for capturing deadlock information. Extended Events infrastructure is built directly… Read more