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.

Scheduling Statistics Maintenance in Azure SQL Data Warehouse

The power and capabilities of Azure SQL Data Warehouse are pretty amazing. However, it’s still basically SQL Server under the...

Data About Execution Plans

If you look at the Properties for the first operator of a graphical execution plan, you get all sorts of great...

Query Optimizer and Data Definition Language Queries

Data Definition Language queries don’t go through the optimizer, right? While normally, my short answer to this question in the past would...

Presentations for SQL Server Beginners

Tired from all those blog postsFor my final blog post in the #gettingstarted, #iwanttohelp series, I decided to curate a...

Database Configuration

It’s amazing just how much the landscape changed with the release of SQL Server 2016 SP1. For example, I just...

The autogenerated view

Database Clone

There are a bunch of ways you could create a database clone. Backup and restore is one method. Export/Import is...

PASS Board: Year-End Wrap-Up

This month concludes my second full year on the PASS Board of Directors and my first full year on the...

Comparing Execution Plans