Hands-On with Columnstore Indexes: Part 2 Best Practices and Guidelines
In the second article of this series, Edward Pollack demonstrates some ways to design and populate a columnstore index to get even better performance.
2020-07-17
SQL
6 New Courses Published on the Redgate University
Master the fundamentals of Redgate products with easy to follow video courses on Redgate University. This month 6 new courses have been published to help you advance your skills including courses on SQL Prompt, SQL Monitor, SQL Change Automation, SQL Compare, and Database DevOps for Oracle. All brought to you by some amazing presenters like Kendra Little, Grant Fritchey, Kathi Kellenberger and the Redgate team of experts. Start learning now!
2020-07-17
Heaps in SQL Server: Part 2 Optimizing Reads
In the second article of this series, Uwe Ricken discusses ways to affect the performance of queries involving heaps, including the TOP operator, compression, and partitioning.
2020-07-15
Hands-On with Columnstore Indexes: Part 1 Architecture
Microsoft introduced Columnstore with SQL Server 2012 and have improved the feature in every version since then. You may be wondering why they are different than traditional indexes and how they work. In this series, Edward Pollack explains the architecture of Columnstore indexes. In future articles in the series, he will describe best practices for Columnstore.
2020-06-18
Considerations for Deploying Azure SQL Database Managed Instances
Microsoft provides a number of different deployment options for its Azure SQL Database offerings. While most of them share the same characteristics, one in particular warrants special attention from the standpoint of its infrastructure dependencies. That exception is Azure SQL Database Managed Instance, which will be the topic of this article.
2020-06-16
Right-Sizing Row Mode Query Memory Requirements
When the optimizer doesn’t estimate the correct amount of memory for a query, either memory is wasted that could be used for other processes or some operations will spill to disk. Microsoft has added Memory Grant Feedback to help overcome this issue. In this article, Greg Larsen explains what you need to know about this new feature.
2020-06-10
Working with SQL Cursors
n SQL cursors serve as a pointer that enables application programming language to deal with query results one row at a time. Read on to explores the concept behind and learn how to declare cursors, open, retrieve data from them, and then close them.
2020-06-09
Concurrency Control in SQL Server
Learn a bit about concurrency problems in SQL Server, the issues they create, and the different isolation levels that help you solve them.
2020-05-12
43,031 reads
SQL Server Machine Learning 2019: Working with Security Changes
SQL Server Machine Learning allows you to run R and Python scripts from SQL Server. When SQL Server 2019 was released, Microsoft enhanced the security for this functionality, but it caused some existing code writing to the file system to to break. In this article, Dennes Torres explains the security enhancement and describes three ways to work with it.
2020-03-11
Storage 101: Understanding the Hard-Disk Drive
In this article in the series, Robert Sheldon provides a deep dive into HDDs.
2020-03-09
Blogs
Methodology for dealing with bad data in production
By Brian Kelley
Pinal Dave wrote up his methodology for what to do when you discover bad...
How to Provision an Azure SQL Database
Aside from spinning up a SQL Server instance container, the free Azure SQL Database...
Claude finds two cryptographic weaknesses (but the sky isn’t falling)
By Brian Kelley
If you haven't seen the announcement, Anthropic was able to utilize Claude (Mythos Preview)...
Forums
Why SQL Server Database Attach fails and how to repair it
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Why SQL Server Database Attach...
Fixing P1 Queries
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BIT_COUNT() IV
Comments posted to this topic are about the item BIT_COUNT() IV
Question of the Day
BIT_COUNT() IV
In SQL Server 2025, I run this code:
select bit_count('A')
What is returned? See possible answers