There are several things that you can do to improve performance by throwing more hardware at the problem, but usually the place you get the most benefit from is when you tune your queries. One common problem that exists is the lack of indexes or incorrect indexes and therefore SQL Server has to process more data to find the records that meet the queries criteria. These issues are known as Index Scans and Table Scans.
2025-06-06
In this next article, we are going to explore how to install, configure and use the command line to manage a couple different Fabric Lakehouse’s.
2025-06-04
1,546 reads
Purging data from a table is a common database maintenance task to prevent it from growing too large or to stay in compliance with data retention. When dealing with small amounts of data, this can be accomplished by a simple delete with no issues; however, with larger tables, this task can be problematic. Deleting records requires a lock that can block other processes from writing or even reading the data (depending on your isolation level). In this article I will share a technique I have used to work with some very large tables.
2025-06-04
What DMVs were added to Azure SQL Databases, and which DMVs are missing from Azure SQL Databases but still exist on SQL Server 2019 or other versions?
2025-06-02
Learn how you can conduct a sentiment analysis on data loaded into an Excel spreadsheet.
2025-05-30
1,271 reads
What advice would you give to someone new to Power BI? What are common Power BI mistakes to avoid? In this article, we will discuss several Power BI mistakes to avoid to help you navigate this powerful tool effectively.
2025-05-30
With the popular data transformation tool dbt (data build tool), we have a bunch of interesting features at our disposal to write SQL more efficiently. One of those features is macros, which we’ll introduce in this article
2025-05-28
Learn how you can use Power BI to forecase the future trends of data.
2025-05-26 (first published: 2023-02-27)
51,074 reads
What are some of the most common mistakes when working with Power BI? For example, when a junior colleague starts on a Power BI project for the first time, what are the pitfalls you try to warn them about? What advice would you give them?
2025-05-26
This article examines how tempdb is affected by recursive queries, using a few different methods.
2025-05-23
2,102 reads
By Steve Jones
Leave a gate behind you the way you first found it. – from Excellent...
By SQLPals
Fix Slow, Bloated MSDB: Purge Old History And Add Missing Indexes ...
By James Serra
Organizations increasingly want Snowflake and Microsoft Fabric to coexist without duplicating data or fragmenting...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item 25 Years of SQL Server...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Decoded Value
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Deploying SQL Server Developer Edition...
In SQL Server 2025, what is returned from this code:
DECLARE @message VARCHAR(50) = 'Hello SQL Server 2025!'; DECLARE @encoded VARCHAR(MAX); SET @encoded = BASE64_ENCODE(CAST(@message AS VARBINARY(1000))); SELECT BASE64_DECODE(@encoded)See possible answers