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
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
What DMVs were added to Azure SQL Databases, and which DMVs are missing from Azure SQL Databases but still exist on SQL Server 2019 or other versions?
2025-06-02
What advice would you give to someone new to Power BI? What are common Power BI mistakes to avoid? In this article, we will discuss several Power BI mistakes to avoid to help you navigate this powerful tool effectively.
2025-05-30
With the popular data transformation tool dbt (data build tool), we have a bunch of interesting features at our disposal to write SQL more efficiently. One of those features is macros, which we’ll introduce in this article
2025-05-28
What are some of the most common mistakes when working with Power BI? For example, when a junior colleague starts on a Power BI project for the first time, what are the pitfalls you try to warn them about? What advice would you give them?
2025-05-26
In this article, you’ll learn about the many options for using a GitHub-hosted runner, including Docker.
2025-05-23
The STRING_AGG function concatenates strings separated by a specified separator. This was introduced with SQL Server 2017.
2025-05-21
In Part 2, we shift our focus to securing containerized deployments and cloud infrastructure. We will cover Kubernetes security hardening, real-time monitoring, infrastructure as code (IaC) security, and shifting security left to catch misconfigurations early. These strategies will help your team secure workloads in production and respond to potential threats before they lead to a security breach.
2025-05-19
The ASCII function is used to return the ASCII value for the first character in a string.
2025-05-16
By Vinay Thakur
it has been a year since i have not written much on the blog...
By Steve Jones
on tenderhooks – adj. feeling the primal satisfaction of being needed by someone, which...
By DataOnWheels
I have been active in the data community throughout my career. I have met...
I have a quick question on Ola Hallengren Index Optimize Maintenance . Do we...
hi, in an ssis for each loop over an object variable called MyListVariable, i...
SQL Server is typically viewed as a transactional or analytical database engine. However, it...
On SQL Server 2025, when I run this, what is returned?
SELECT EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY('SQL Server', 'MySQL') See possible answers