Use Filtered Statistics to Improve Performance on Very Large Tables

Let’s say you have a very large table on a SQL Server 2012 Standard Edition instance. This means: old cardinality...

Data Modeling for Self-Service BI @ Techorama 2018

I’m delighted to announce I’ll be giving a session about data modeling in a self-service BI environment at Techorama 2018...

SQL Server and Evil Greedy Data Types

In a recent post, I talked about SQL Server reads and how the data is stored in pages. One of...

A Very Happy Holi – Festival of colors, Colors of life

New Built-in Function CONCAT_WS() – SQL Server 2017

In my previous post on new functions in SQL Server 2017, I discussed about the STRING_AGG function. Here, I am...

A Swiss Army Knife Might Not Make the Best Shovel

You might have noticed that I’ve been pretty quiet as of late. We’re working on a super top secret internal...

Speaking at the 2018 Techno Security and Digital Forensics Conference

One of my favorite conferences is held in Myrtle Beach, SC, in June. It’s a security and digital forensics conference which...

An overview of SQL Server backup-and-restore process

In a manner of speaking, planning and implementing a SQL Server backup design is an art. Backup, Restoration, Recovery, Business...

Database Superhero Adventures, March 2018 Edition

I had two SQL Saturdays this month SQLSaturday Cleveland (which was very cold) and SQLSaturday Tampa (which had very nice...

Azure SQL Database – Allow Azure Services to Access Server

When you create a “logical” Azure SQL Server (I say logical because we are not really physically creating anything) there...