SQL Server: How Important Are Index Statistics
In this article Greg Larsen will show you how to identify when your index statistics were updated last, what method was used to gather statistics, and how to update your statistics.
An Automated Process to Archive Big Tables
Many databases have large tables with hundreds of millions of rows. However, many of these tables are simply keeping a log or history data that can be archived and kept outside the user database in a special archive database.
Programming
Programming is an important skill, perhaps extremely important for the future. Steve Jones thinks that's true.
Understanding SQL Server Query Optimization Statistics
In this article, you will learn what query optimisation statistics are and how SQL Server query optimizer uses statistics. You will also learn how to create and manage statistics, and what are the different ways to determine when statistics were last updated in SQL Server.
Reporting on Data
Reporting is an important skill for many data professionals. Steve Jones has a few things you might consider working on as a data professional.
SQL Saturday #230 Rheinland
SQL Saturday is a training event for SQL Server professionals and those wanting to learn about SQL Server. This event will be held Jul 13 2013 at Grantham-Allee 20, Sankt Augustin, Cologne/Bonn, Rheinland, 53757 , Germany.
Identify and Correct SQL Server Forwarded Records
Forwarded records in SQL Server can cause performance issues on heap tables because the record outgrows the page and the database engine uses pointers to reference the data. The best practice is to have a clustered index on every table, however, sometimes there are cases when a clustered index is not needed.
Your Frame of Reference
How you examine and approach a problem might have a large impact on how you solve it. Steve Jones notes that it's important that all of us look at the problem from the point of view of the customer, as well as our own view.
Exploring In-memory OLTP Engine (Hekaton) in SQL Server 2014 CTP1
The continuing drop in the price of memory has made fast in-memory OLTP increasingly viable. SQL Server 2014 allows you to migrate the most-used tables in an existing database to memory-optimized 'Hekaton' technology, but how you balance between disk tables and in-memory tables for optimum performance requires judgement and experiment.
New SQL Monitor Custom Metric: Untrusted Check Constraints
This metric returns the number of check constraints that have their is_not_trusted flag set to 1 in the sys.check_constraints table. Untrusted constraints force SQL Server to construct less efficient query plans, because it doesn’t know enough about the kind of data contained in the table. This can point to a data integrity issue which should be investigated.
Blogs
A Career of Memories
By Steve Jones
Annabel retired from Redgate Software this week. Across most of my career at Redgate,...
Rethinking Index Maintenance: Why avg_fragmentation_in_percent Is Outdated and What You Should Do Instead
By Tim Radney
As a SQL Server DBA with years of experience tuning production environments, I’ve seen...
Microsoft Build 2026 announcements
By James Serra
Once again there were a number of Microsoft Build announcements related to data and...
Forums
Changes, Happiness, and a Few Tears
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BCP on Linux
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You Probably Don't Need a Vector Database
Comments posted to this topic are about the item You Probably Don't Need a...
Question of the Day
BCP on Linux
When running bcp on Linux, what is the field terminator?
See possible answers