I'm In Charge of Books Online
Today Steve has an announcement about his role in moving Books Online forward.
SQL Server 2019 Adds CosmosDB Support
SQL Server 2019 will bring more than graph query languages. We will be able to use a document query engine and a specific JSON engine.
Converting a History Table into a System-Versioned Temporal Table
Temporal tables were introduced with SQL Server 2016. To take advantage of this feature, you might start fresh with a brand new table. It is possible, however, to convert an existing table with accumulated history to the new functionality. In this article, Mala Mahadevan explains how to create temporal tables for both scenarios.
Containers Are The Present, Not the Future
Last week was the MVP Summit. This year included a bunch of very technical discussions about some of the future of the Microsoft Data Platform (a big thank you goes to Slava Oks, Bob Ward, and all the team for a great job). I can’t share much since it was all under NDA. All I […]
An Introduction to SQL Server Indexes: Stairway to SQL Server Indexes Level 1
Indexes are the database objects that enable SQL Server to satisfy each data access request from a client application with the minimum amount of effort, resulting in the maximum performance of individual requests while also reducing the impact of one request upon another. Prerequisites: Familiarity with the following relational database concepts: Table, row, primary key, foreign key
Clustered Indexes: Stairway to SQL Server Indexes Level 3
Now that we've seen the basics of indexing, and taken a deeper dive into Nonclustered Indexes, this Level will focus on searching the table, which will, in turn, will lead us to a discussion of clustered indexes.
Index Fragmentation in SQL Server: Stairway to SQL Server Indexes Level 11
Internal and external fragmentation – Causes, cures, and when not to care
Indexes with Included Columns: Stairway to SQL Server Indexes Level 5
Included columns enable nonclustered indexes to become covering indexes for a variety of queries, improving the performance of those queries and with the only overhead being an increase the size of an index.
Pages and Extents: Stairway to SQL Server Indexes Level 4
We've now seen how indexed and non-indexed tables perform in queries, and established "logical reads" as the metric for query performance. Now it is time to explain why logical reads are an excellent metric and also explain what is actually being read.
Blogs
Houston AI-Lytics 2026–Powerpoint Slides
By Steve Jones
Thanks to everyone for attending my session on running a Local LLM. If you...
The Book of Redgate: Do the Right Things
By Steve Jones
I do believe that Redgate has been very customer focused since it’s inception. I’ve...
GenAI vs Dashboards: Not the Same (And Never Will Be)
By James Serra
There’s a question I’ve been hearing more and more lately, especially as Copilot, Fabric,...
Forums
T-SQL in SQL Server 2025: JSON_ARRAYAGG
Comments posted to this topic are about the item T-SQL in SQL Server 2025:...
Spring Connections and Learning at PASS On Tour
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Spring Connections and Learning at...
Multiple Sequence Values
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Multiple Sequence Values
Question of the Day
Multiple Sequence Values
How do I easily get the next 12 sequence values from a sequence object?
See possible answers