During the process of performance tuning queries and stored procedures there comes a time when you will notice that the execution plan selected by SQL Server is not the best plan. On occasion, everything you try doesnt cause SQL Server to choose the best way to execute your code. These are the times when hints can improve performance.
2002-09-10
9,460 reads
Bitwise operators can be challenging to manage at first. However, with practice and patience, and under the right conditions, these operators can provide remarkable performance improvements in production environments. This article will compare two methods of accomplishing the same output, one with a normalized model and the other with bitwise operators.
2002-09-05
12,003 reads
The strength and holy grail of relational databases lies in the very name: relations. Microsoft has put a good deal of intelligence and cunning into query optimizations, caching, indexing and execution plans to make the process of finding related records even smoother and faster. This small article, however, will try to shatter the very sacred notion of relational databases.
2002-07-29
8,356 reads
The purpose of this article is to give you a working knowledge of how to view and understand query execution plans for SQL Server. This is part 1 in a series of articles that will walk you through understanding execution plans to help you improve your queries.
2002-07-26
24,293 reads
Programmers can most commonly relate to interface-based programming in their programming language. This is harder to accomplish in SQL Server though. In this article by Chris Cubley, he shows you how to build interfaced-based SQL.
2002-07-19
7,413 reads
What would you do if your SQL Server database mysteriously lost 11GB of data? Find out what happened to me. This story has a happy ending.
2002-07-03
1,149 reads
This article shows you how to use the CASE function to design single query solutions that have changing results depending on the values you assign to variables. These techniques are extremely useful as alternatives to dynamic SQL.
2002-05-14
10,834 reads
This book from Microsoft Press has a lot of good information that will help you do capacity planning and performance tuning. Is it worth buying though? Andy just finishing reading it and writing the review, see what he thinks!
2002-05-03
8,345 reads
Building and executing dynamic sql in a stored procedure - is it the only way to solve problems like supporting a simple search function? Leon offers a couple alternatives that let you continue to provide the functionality in a stored procedure without using dynamic sql. Interesting ideas worth exploring!
2002-05-02
13,098 reads
As you advance in your skills as a Transact-SQL developer or SQL Server database administrator there will come a time when you need to override SQL Server's locking scheme and force a particular range of locks on a table. This article by Randy Dyess shows you how to optimize your queries using table hints.
2002-04-15
21,938 reads
Forgive me for the title. Mentally I’m 12. When I started my current day...
By Steve Jones
One of the things a customer asked recently about Redgate Data Modeler was how...
By Steve Jones
For a number of years, we’ve produced the State of the Database Landscape report,...
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In SQL Server 2025, what is returned by this code:
SELECT EDIT_DISTANCE('Steve', 'Stan')
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