SQL Server Agent and Daylight Saving time

There was a bit of chat today on the SQL Community slack about UTC and Daylight Saving Time. It reminded...

SQL Server Query Store

Query Store was, probably without doubt, the most anticipated and talked out new feature in SQL 2016. Certainly by the...

SQLServerCentral Design–bbPress

This is part of a series of posts that look at the changes to the SQLServerCentral design, bringing us to v3 of the site. You can see the other...

Statistics and Cardinality Estimation

Cardinality
This is a term originally from Mathematics, generally defined as “The number of objects in a given set or grouping”....

Statistics and the Ascending Key Problem

I’ve mentioned previously how not having up to date statistics can cause problems in query performance. This post looks at...

Statistics Parser

In the last post we looked at using the STATISTICS IO and STATISTICS TIME commands to measure query performance.
If you’ve...

Table Variable Performance “Fixed” in SQL 2019

Reading the new features for SQL 2019 I spotted this:
One of the most popular posts on my blog last year...

TDE and backup compression – still not working?

Until SQL 2016 if you used TDE (Transparent Data Encryption) you couldn’t use backup compression.
In 2016 Microsoft changed this, but...

There’s Still a Place for SQL Server Profiler

Follow a few of the SQL Family on Twitter and you’ll mostly see one view regards SQL Profiler, and it’s...

Think twice before using table variables

T-SQL Tuesday

For T-SQL Tuesday this month Raul Gonzalez has asked us all to blog about lessons learnt the hard way:
http://www.sqldoubleg.com/2017/07/03/tsql2sday-92-lessons-learned-the-hard-way/
My...