There is now a vast amount of SQL Server information and 'best practice' advice available on the Internet, in the form of innumerable blogs, community sites and forums. Finding an answer to your question is relatively easy, but finding the right, or best, answer is harder than ever.   Read more...

Some tips on what to do when you inherit a database that you've never worked on before   Read more...

In the previous tips (SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) - Best Practices - Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3) of this series I briefly talked about SSIS and few of the best practices to consider while designing SSIS packages. Continuing on this path I am going to discuss some more best practices of SSIS package design, how you can use lookup transformations and what considerations you need to take, the impact of implicit type cast in SSIS, changes in SSIS 2008 internal system tables and stored procedures and finally some general guidelines.  Read more...

Query performance can be affected by many different factors. This article introduces another best practice of how and how not to use a function within your T-SQL statements.  Read more...

This tip is going to cover recommendations related to the SQL Server Destination Adapter, asynchronous transformations, DefaultBufferMaxSize and DefaultBufferMaxRows, BufferTempStoragePath and BLOBTempStoragePath as well as the DelayValidation property.  Read more...

This article, the third in the T-SQL Best Practices series, discusses how to write your code to promote cached plan re-usage. Understanding how white space and comments impact whether a plan is cached or an existing plan is re-used can help you minimize the number of plans your application is caching.  Read more...

The data compression feature in SQL Server 2008 helps compress the data inside a database, and it can help reduce the size of the database. Apart from the space savings, data compression provides another benefit: Because compressed data is stored in fewer pages, queries need to read fewer pages from the disk, thereby improving the performance of I/O intensive workloads. However, extra CPU resources are required on the database server to compress and decompress the data, while data is exchanged with the application. Therefore, it is important to understand the workload characteristics when deciding which tables to compress.  Read more...

Continuing our discussion covering T-SQL best practices, this article focuses on how to optimize writing a jack-of- all-trades stored procedure (SP).  Read more...

This article, the first in a series, discusses T-SQL coding best practices. Join Greg Larsen as he explains how to write queries to optimize SQL Server resources and improve performance.  Read more...

Some tips on what to do when you inherit a database that you've never worked on before   Read more...

When writing SQL, picking good tables aliases can greatly enhance the readability of your code  Read more...

Get correct answers to your SQL forum questions faster by making it easier to load your sample data and read your code.  Read more...

Get correct answers to your SQL forum questions faster by making it easier to load your sample data and read your code.  Read more...

Learn the best practices for SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) in this tutorial, from migrating DTS packages to SSIS debugging, maintenance and programming in SQL Server.  Read more...

There is considerable evidence that successful data warehousing projects often produce a very high return on investment. Over the years a great deal of information has been collected about the factors that lead to a successful implementation versus an unsuccessful one. These are encapsulated here into a set of best practices, which are presented with particular reference to the features in SQL Server 2008.  Read more...

Get correct answers to your SQL forum questions faster by making it easier to load your sample data and read your code.  Read more...

If you have configured database mirroring in synchronous with or without automatic failover mode, you can switch to the mirror server instance and make it available to the clients while you perform hardware or software maintenance on the principal server instance. So let’s see how we can do this:  Read more...

Get correct answers to your SQL forum questions faster by making it easier to load your sample data and read your code.  Read more...

SQL Server expert Jeff Moden discusses a common problem seen in many update statements.  Read more...

Get correct answers to your SQL forum questions faster by making it easier to load your sample data and read your code.  Read more...