Two Steps Ahead
Today Steve Jones talks about those great DBAs, the Exceptional ones that do more than just respond to issues or set up monitoring on their systems.
Getting Started With XML Indexes
XML Indexes make a huge difference to the speed of XML queries, as Seth Delconte explains; and demonstrates by running queries against half a million XML employee records. The execution time of a query is reduced from two seconds to being too quick to measure, purely by creating the right type of secondary index for the query.
A SQL Server Log Reader
There's a hole in the SQL Server platform. No log reader comes with the product and Steve Jones thinks Microsoft should build one and include it.
Stairway to Server-side Tracing - Level 9: How to Automate SQL Traces using the Data Collector
In this level you will see how to employ the Data Collector feature of SQL Server to automate management of SQL Traces among multiple servers.
SQL Server Semantic Search to Find Text in External Files
Sometimes it is necessary to search for specific content inside documents stored in a SQL Server database. Is it possible to do this in SQL Server? Can I run T-SQL queries and find content inside Microsoft Word files? Yes, now with SQL Server 2012 you can do a semantic search.
Walk on the Wild Side
Today Steve Jones talks about the differences between development and production and how it can be good to spend a little doing the other type of work.
Tune Your Indexing Strategy with SQL Server DMVs
SQL Server Indexes need to be effective. It is wrong to have too few or too many. The ones you create must ensure that the workload reads the data quickly with a minimum of I/O. As well as a sound knowledge of the way that relational databases work, it helps to be familiar with the Dynamic Management Objects that are there to assist with your indexing strategy.
Archiving SQL Server Data Using Partitioning
Many companies now have a requirement to keep data for long periods of time. While this data does have to be available if requested, it usually does not need to be accessible by the application for any current transactions. Data that falls into this category are a good candidate for archival.
How to Monitor for High CPU utilization in SQL Server
This is the method that Geoff Albin has used for years to monitor the CPU on his SQL Servers.
Blogs
A Last Minute Trip to the EU
By Steve Jones
My life has some crazy travel stretches for sure. Between speaking, office visits, customer...
Part 3 of 3: Tuning DiskANN — R, Alpha, L, Beam Width, Recall and Latency
In Part 1, we saw how ‘Vamana’ represents vectors as nodes, connects them with...
Automated SQL Server Benchmarking with HammerDB and Docker: A Complete Testing Framework
I’m excited to announce the release of a new open-source project that fully automates...
Forums
Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in SQL Server 2025: Fixing the Kitchen-Sink Search Procedure
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in...
AI Experience Gap that we keep talking about
Comments posted to this topic are about the item AI Experience Gap that we...
Question of the Day
ORDER BY alias
There is a table tmp_tab:
CREATE TABLE tmp_tab ( id int, val int );
INSERT INTO tmp_tab VALUES (1, 1), (2, NULL), (3, 3), (4, 4), (5, 5);You want to order the rows ids by the following expression:
ISNULL(val, id) + 1Which of the following queries produces the expected ordering and why? (Select all correct) See possible answers