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SQL Automate - A DBA's Time-Saving Toolkit

SQLAutomate is a lightweight PowerShell tool that simplifies SQL Server deployment by automating both installation and post-installation configuration. Whether you're setting up one instance or dozens, this guide shows how to use SQLAutomate to save time and reduce manual work.

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2025-06-06

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Index Scans and Table Scans

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

External Article

Purging Data from a Large Table in SQL Server

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

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Change Tracking Data Retention Options

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Requiring Technical Debt Payments

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Using the FP-Growth Algorithm to Mine Useful Patterns in Data

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Question of the Day

Change Tracking Data Retention Options

If I am running this code:

ALTER DATABASE AdventureWorks2017 SET CHANGE_TRACKING = ON (CHANGE_RETENTION=4 xxx);
What are the possible choices for xxx?

See possible answers