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SQLServerCentral Article

Execution Plans

How many of you use Execution Plans to tune your queries? Do you understand the impact of different indexes? Mr. Vijayakumar looks at his experiments with different types of indexes and their effects on the execution plan use. A great article for those of you that want to learn more about how you can tune your server for better performance.

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2017-02-02 (first published: )

53,166 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

Monitoring Drive and Database Free Space

SQL Server will autogrow your databases as they run out of space. But the process doesn't manage space, nor does it check the free space on the drive. Allowing autogrow to grow unchecked and unmanaged will eventually use up all the free disk space and potentially crash your server. New author Mark Nash brings you his system for monitoring space usage and generating a report that eases this process.

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2017-02-02 (first published: )

45,027 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

Performance Monitoring - Basic Counters

What counters should you monitor to baseline your servers? Which ones for checking performance? It's an interesting question and one that always leads Steve Jones to a wide range of sources in print and on the web. Steve compiled his own list and finally has put some words around the list to give some justification of why they are chosen. Read on and see how this compares to your list (you do have a list don't you?).

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2017-02-02 (first published: )

55,622 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

SQL Server Execution Plans, Second Edition by Grant Fritchey

Every Database Administrator, developer, report writer, and anyone else who writes T-SQL to access SQL Server data, must understand how to read and interpret execution plans. This book leads you right from the basics of capturing plans, through how to interrupt them in their various forms, graphical or XML, and then how to use the information you find there to diagnose the most common causes of poor query performance, and so optimize your SQL queries, and improve your indexing strategy.

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2017-02-02

19,115 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

The Effect of NOLOCK on Performance

Using hints in a query is something that most DBAs don't ever seem to bother with, but when they do, NOLOCK seems to be their hint of choice. Wayne Fillis brings us a detailed examination of how this particular hint actually affects the performance of your system.

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2017-02-02 (first published: )

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Question of the Day

The String Distance I

In SQL Server 2025, what is returned by this code:

SELECT EDIT_DISTANCE('Steve', 'Stan')
Assume preview features are enabled.

See possible answers