Technical Article

Slow in the Application, Fast in SSMS? Understanding Performance Mysteries

When I read various forums about SQL Server, I frequently see questions from deeply mystified posters. They have identified a slow query or stored procedure in their application. They cull the SQL batch from the application and run it in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to analyse it, only to find that the response is instantaneous. At this point they are inclined to think that SQL Server is all about magic. A similar mystery is when a developer has extracted a query in his stored procedure to run it stand-alone only to find that it runs much faster – or much slower – than inside the procedure.

SQLServerCentral Article

Concatenating Rows

Often in database design we store different values in rows to take advantage of a normalized design. However many times we need to combine multiple rows of data into one row for a report of some sort. New author Carl P. Anderson brings us some interesting T-SQL code to accomplish this.

SQLServerCentral Editorial

SLA Contracts

This Friday Steve Jones talks about the commitments and contracts that you may have with your customers. Do you know what they are? Is the contract explicitly spelled out? Take this Friday's poll and share your answer with everyone else.

External Article

Look-up Tables in SQL

Lookup tables can be a force for good in a relational database. Whereas the 'One True Lookup Table' remains a classic of bad database design, an auxiliary table that holds static data, and is used to lookup values, still has powerful magic. Joe Celko explains....

Technical Article

T-SQL Quiz 2011

The 2011 edition of MVP Jacob Sebastian's T-SQL Quiz is underway. You can take part in the quiz each day, submitting your answers for the chance to show off your knowledge and perhaps win some prizes.

Blogs

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Forums

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Recently, our dev teams approach me for advice on improving their huge heap table...

Merge Replication failing with Error converting data type nvarchar to numeric

By Leo.Miller

After upgrading 2 Merge Replicated databases to SQL 2022 and re-establishing the Merge Replication...

Why Your Index Isn't Being Used? - Reading Execution Plans to Find the Real Culprit

By Sanket Parmar

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Why Your Index Isn't Being...

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Question of the Day

Distance Metric Algorithms

What are the distance metric algorithms that can be used in VECTOR_DISTANCE()?

See possible answers