Mentors and Professional Groups

When wrestling with technical problems or ideas, it is good to discuss with, argue against, present ideas to, and listen to your colleagues. This is true of anyone working in IT, but really important for the likes of database professionals who are engaged in a very rapidly-developing engineering specialism that demands that you keep up […]

Connecting to SQL Data Warehouse

The most frustrating thing with any new system is often just working out how to connect to it. Oddly, you can’t use SSMS with SQL Data Warehouse, but it is fine with SSDT, SSIS, Power BI desktop, sqlcmd, BCP, and a range of Microsoft cloud services - there are PowerShell Cmdlets too. Rob Sheldon provides the details.

Bias, the Serial Killer of Diversity

Today we have a guest editorial from Kellyn Pot'Vin that tackles the tough topic of diversity.

Dynamically Query a 100 Million Row Table-Efficiently

This article describes methods of creating dynamic queries without the use of dynamic SQL to efficiently access large tables.

Automatically Creating UML Database Diagrams for SQL Server

SQL Server database developers seem reluctant to use diagrams when documenting their databases. It is probably because it has, in the past, been difficult to automatically draw precisely what you want, other than a vast Entity-relationship diagram. However, you can do it without buying any third-party tool, just using some existing Java-based open-source tools; and can even automate it entirely, using SQL and PowerShell. Phil Factor shows how.

Diagnosing parallelism-related latching

Diagnosing and resolving parallelism-related latching and blocking in SQL Server using DMV’s, the activity monitor, procedure execution plans, and index tuning.

Should I Stay or Go?

Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren that looks at the decision to leave a job. Or not.

A tour through tool improvements in SQL Server 2016

Ayo Olubeko talks through the improvements being made to SQL Server tooling in 2016.

Byte Me: Forget It

Implementing Azure SQL Database Elastic Database Jobs

Sometimes it's good to re-think how to write a query; set operations can provide performance benefits over 'straight SQL'. In this article, David Fitzjarrell takes a look at one such example in action.