Azure SQL Data Warehouse: Explaining the Architecture Through System Views

The architecture of Azure SQL Data Warehouse isn't easy to explain briefly, but if you have some useful queries that access the management and catalog views, and diagrams that show how they relate together, you can very quickly get a feel for what is going on under the hood. By using and extending these queries that use these views, you can check on a variety waits, blocking, status, table distribution and data movement in ASDW.

Reading Backup History Information for a Database

There are times when you might want to read backup/restore history information to identify a backup’s start and finish date/time, the location where the backup was written, the size of the database backup, etc. Greg Larsen shows you how to do this in SQL Server.

Learning SQL Server 2016

Here is a reference that lets you take a quick look at the new features in SQL Server 2016 and dig into the various items with a collection of links we'll maintain.

Visualize the timeline of your SQL jobs using Google graph and email

Generate an HTML page with the timeline of your SQL jobs using Google graph and sp_send_dbmail

SQL Server 2016 DBCC CHECKDB with MAXDOP

Ahmad Yaseen explains how you can control the number of processors assigned to the SQL Server DBCC CHECKDB command in order to free-up the server's resources.

Dummies Guide for a SQL Server Presentation

Preparing for SQL Server presentations is always a challenge. This article provides a few guidelines for the same

SQL Database: How to Configure Active Geo-Replication

Active Geo-location is powerful magic for ensuring the high availability of a Azure SQL database, and for disaster-recovery. In choosing the best options, you need to accurately understand the value that the business places on the service you're running, long it will take for a secondary replica to be in synch with the primary replica, the importance of spreading the location of replicas widely, and the maximum tolerable unscheduled downtime. Just clicking all the options could prove to be expensive.

Byte Me: Cloud Storage

Real-time Operational Analytics in SQL Server 2016 - Part 2

Arshad Ali discusses the different design considerations for leveraging the Real-time Operational Analytics feature of SQL Server 2016, covering the different scenarios where it fits or does not fit, and how to get started with it for disk based tables.

Database Nonsense - Unstructured Data

Sloppy terminology leads to big misunderstandings. Terms don't get much sloppier than "Unstructured data".