Additional 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

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

External Article

Database Administration as a Service

A DBA should provide two things, a service and leadership. For Grant Fritchey, it was whilst serving a role in the Scouts of America that he had his epiphany. Creative chaos and energy, if tactfully harnessed and directed, led to effective ways to perform team-based tasks. Then he wondered why these skills couldn't be applied to the workplace. Are we DBAs doing it wrong in the way we interact with our co-workers?

2013-08-29

4,071 reads

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Forums

VS Code, Unresolved References.

By mjdemaris

Hi all, I just started using VS Code to work with DB projects.  I...

Fun with JSON II

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Fun with JSON II

Changing Data Types

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Changing Data Types

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Question of the Day

Fun with JSON II

I have some data in a table:

CREATE TABLE #test_data
(
    id INT PRIMARY KEY,
    name VARCHAR(100),
    birth_date DATE
);

-- Step 2: Insert rows  
INSERT INTO #test_data
VALUES
(1, 'Olivia', '2025-01-05'),
(2, 'Emma', '2025-03-02'),
(3, 'Liam', '2025-11-15'),
(4, 'Noah', '2025-12-22');
If I run this query, how many rows are returned?
SELECT t1.[key] AS row,
       t2.*
FROM OPENJSON(
     (
         SELECT t.* FROM #test_data AS t FOR JSON PATH
     )
             ) t1
    CROSS APPLY OPENJSON(t1.value) t2;

See possible answers