Duplicate & Overlapping Indexes can be a drag on write speed and disk resources. How do we find and eliminate them quickly and effectively?
2016-07-08 (first published: 2014-06-16)
46,252 reads
What are natively compiled stored procedures? Why would we want to use them and what are the performance benefits of using them over classic disk-based stored procedures?
2016-05-20 (first published: 2014-08-04)
24,996 reads
Have you ever wanted to run a query across every database on a server with the convenience of a stored procedure? If so, Microsoft provided a stored procedure to do so. It’s unreliable, outdated, and somewhat obfuscated, though. Let’s improve on it!
2016-04-15 (first published: 2014-12-01)
17,013 reads
It sounds simple enough. Either your column will always have a value or it may not. Yet somehow such a seemingly simple decision can become a never-ending debate where database schema begins to resemble superstition and designing effective tables seems more contentious than you expected it to be.
2016-02-26 (first published: 2014-10-30)
27,360 reads
Cursors are considered by many to be the bane of good T-SQL. What are the best ways to avoid iterative T-SQL and to write queries that look and perform beautifully? This first part in an ongoing series of cursor-killing handles inter-row analysis.
2015-12-18 (first published: 2014-05-27)
22,688 reads
CONNECT ANY DATABASE is one of three new permissions in SQL Server 2014 that can be granted to server logins. What is this new permission good for and why would we ever want this?
2014-07-29
15,128 reads
SQL Server 2012 introduced columnstore indexes, which can immensely improve the performance of OLAP queries. How were they updated and improved in SQL Server 2014?
2014-07-24
8,393 reads
SQL Server 2014 has a number of new DMVs, and some changes from SQL Server 2012. What are the new views and changes, and how can be useful to you?
2014-07-08
4,674 reads
There were many new DMVs added in SQL Server 2012, and some that have changed since SQL Server 2008 R2. This is a brief overview of the biggest changes and what they mean to you!
2014-07-03
6,116 reads
Statistics keep track of our data and will tell SQL Server how to make the best optimization decisions. Knowing how they work can make understanding query and performance problems much easier!
2014-06-09
5,672 reads
By Steve Jones
While wandering around the documentation looking for some Question of the Day topics, I...
By Arun Sirpal
Third part in my Ai series with databases. When building AI solutions within the...
By Steve Jones
This month we have a very interesting invitation from Koen Verbeeck. He has hosted...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How Do the Experts Become...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Stairway to Reliable Database Deployments...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Secure Communications
As of June 2026, what is the best version of TLS to use with SQL Server?
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