Running SQL In Azure So you want to store your relational data in the Microsoft Azure Cloud. What is the best way to go about it? It turns out there are two methods for working with SQL Server in Azure: SQL Azure SQL Server running on a virtual machine in Azure These two technologies differ considerably when it comes to […]

Reader Comments on Table Variables Let’s wrap up this week with some comments from our readers on Table Variables. Michael: I wanted to send out a gotcha with Table Types as Inputs to stored procedures. The order of the columns in your .Net application need to exactly match what you have defined for your Table Type. Otherwise it will fail(casting […]

Table Variables as Stored Procedure Input To end this series on Table Variables I would like to review table variables used as input to stored procedures. This is a capability added with SQL Server 2008. It fills the gap in the SQL syntax allowing for stored procedures to accept one or more sets as input to a stored procedure. In […]

Table Variable Uses – Cursors I shared a list of uses for Table Variables in which I said they were great for holding content against which to define cursors. Rather than get into the controversy of cursors being good or bad, let me just say that SQL performs best as a set language. However, there are times when breaking your […]

A Great Technology, or a Fix for Bad Designs NCache seems to get gaining momentum as a tool to improve performance of your application. A grid like higher performing virtual memory cache, NCache allows you to reduce the number of trips necessary to utilize slower persistence technologies such as a database. It integrates with common database ORM tools simplifying integration […]

Table Variables in User Defined Table Functions Today I want to drill briefly into one of the uses described yesterday for using Table Variables…user defined table functions. There are two kinds of user defined table functions. The best performing version is a table value function that returns the results of a single SQL Statement. That statement may be a compound […]

Table Variable Uses Yesterday we considered some of the differences between Declared table variables and traditional temp tables created by defining a table prefixed with # or ##. Today I would like to present some cases to use Table Variables. Table variables may be used in any SQL Statement, and only exist for the execution of SQL Statements either dynamically […]

SQL Table Variables Table variables, like their cousin temp tables are variables not intended to be permanent residents in your database. The definition of both temp tables and table variables reside in TempDB. Generally, @ table variables declared are maintained only in memory. A # or ## table resides as long as your database connection continues to be open. They […]

How Do You Track IT Resources? Recently I overheard some colleagues talking about allocating IP addresses to servers, some physical and some virtual. I have also been documenting some different environments myself consisting of multiple servers per environment, some with multiple IP addresses per server. The thought occurred to me this might be a good topic to open up for […]

Turn On Auto Create Statistics In response to the previous editorial, Maurice, one of our most frequent contributing readers, provides this insight from his personal experience. In one of our development team, there was a practice of not turning on auto create statistics option at database level. There was a fear of slowing queries, which is a misconception I will […]