Articles

External Article

Techniques For Improving SQL Query Performance - Indexing, Parameterization and Partitioning

You are tasked with examining poor performance for queries on a certain table, or range of tables. Perhaps a sales report is timing out or running unacceptably slow; perhaps your web application is failing to return the result set before the application timeout is reached. You need to find out what's causing the bottleneck, and optimize either the queries used, the table schemata, or both.

2013-09-06

6,400 reads

External Article

Getting Data between Excel and SQL Server using ODBC

With ODBC, you can summarise, and select just the data you need, in an Excel workbook before importing it into SQL Server. You can join data from different areas or worksheets. You can even get data from the result of a SQL Server SELECT statement into an Excel spreadsheet. Phil Factor shows how, and warns of some of the pitfalls.

2013-09-05

4,816 reads

External Article

New Enhanced Column Store Index in SQL Server 2014 – Part 1

Column Store Index, which improves performance of data warehouse queries several folds, was first introduced in SQL Server 2012. Unlike regular indexes or heaps, which store data in B-Tree structure (in row-wise fashion), the column store index stores data in columnar fashion and uses compression aggressively to reduce the disk I/O needed to serve the query request. In this article, Arshad Ali talks about the new enhanced columnstore index feature in SQL Server 2014.

2013-09-04

2,487 reads

External Article

Opportunity for Business Intelligence developer

Red Gate is looking for a Business Intelligence Developer to work with our internal development team on creating business intelligence solutions. You'll be responsible for designing, building, and testing end-to-end BI solutions using the Microsoft BI stack, so we'll expect you to be passionate about understanding data and generating a universe of analytics for your customers – our Red Gaters.

2013-09-04

3,709 reads

External Article

New SQL Monitor Custom Metric: Large Transaction Log Files

If the transaction log autogrows rapidly, it can suggest that log backups are not being carried out frequently enough, or another resource may be preventing the log from truncating. This metric measures the number of transaction log files that are greater than 10 GB. The associated alert is raised when the number of files exceeds a specified threshold.

2013-09-03

2,422 reads

Blogs

Monday Monitor Tips: Virtual Machine Usage and Cost

By

One of the things I’ve been requesting for a number of years is cost...

Advice I Like: Respect

By

“Don’t aim to have others like you; aim to have them respect you.” –...

Blue Sky Programming – The Optimism Trap

By

Many years ago, before I joined Oracle, I was working on a major modernisation...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

SQL Art, Part 4: Happy 4th of July — A British DBA's Guide to Celebrating a War We Don't Talk About

By Terry Jago

Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Art, Part 4: Happy...

SQL Server Still Wins

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server Still Wins

DBCC CHECKDB Limits I

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item DBCC CHECKDB Limits I

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

DBCC CHECKDB Limits I

When running DBCC CHECKDB on SQL Server 2025, can I include the Resource Database?

See possible answers