CU#6 for SQL Server 2014 SP1 Updated

Please re-apply CU#6 for SQL Server 2014 SP1 as it has been updated.

How to Identify Useful SQL Server Table Statistics

In this article, Fikrat Azizov describes the different approaches to maintaining statistics and shows how you can use the data from your servers for intelligent statistics updates.

Third Party Visuals in Power BI Desktop

Power BI is as extensible as it is powerful In this article you will see how to impress your users with added visuals

Is a RID Lookup faster than a Key Lookup?

For T-SQL Tuesday #78, Aaron Bertrand takes a look at whether RID Lookups are faster than Key Lookups, with a small battery of fairly simple duration tests.

Connecting to SQL Data Warehouse

The most frustrating thing with any new system is often just working out how to connect to it. Oddly, you can’t use SSMS with SQL Data Warehouse, but it is fine with SSDT, SSIS, Power BI desktop, sqlcmd, BCP, and a range of Microsoft cloud services - there are PowerShell Cmdlets too. Rob Sheldon provides the details.

Dynamically Query a 100 Million Row Table-Efficiently

This article describes methods of creating dynamic queries without the use of dynamic SQL to efficiently access large tables.

Automatically Creating UML Database Diagrams for SQL Server

SQL Server database developers seem reluctant to use diagrams when documenting their databases. It is probably because it has, in the past, been difficult to automatically draw precisely what you want, other than a vast Entity-relationship diagram. However, you can do it without buying any third-party tool, just using some existing Java-based open-source tools; and can even automate it entirely, using SQL and PowerShell. Phil Factor shows how.

Diagnosing parallelism-related latching

Diagnosing and resolving parallelism-related latching and blocking in SQL Server using DMV’s, the activity monitor, procedure execution plans, and index tuning.

A tour through tool improvements in SQL Server 2016

Ayo Olubeko talks through the improvements being made to SQL Server tooling in 2016.

Byte Me: Forget It