(Paul White) It is relatively well-known that using TOP or a FAST n query hint can set a row goal in an execution plan (see Setting and Identifying Row Goals in Execution Plans if you need a refresher on row goals and their causes).

(Siddharth Mehta) In decision analysis, Classification and Regression Trees (CART) are typically used for data analysis. Once the optimal tree structure is derived using the CART technique, business users are provided with a tree structure, and advised to navigate and analyze the data in the hierarc

(Denny Cherry) A lot of the examples you’ll see for MAXDOP on the web assume a large server with multiple physical sockets and multiple NUMA nodes. But if you have a smaller server, like a lot of us do these days, what should you set the MAXDOP to?

(Greg Larsen) When using Transparent Data Encryption, you might wonder “What is the state of my transparent data encrypted database?” There are many different states that a transparent data encrypted database might go through.

(Pinal Dave) One of my clients took my assistance to deploy Always On availability group. After few months, they added a Disaster Recovery node to windows cluster and availability group also.

(Don Castelino) In this article, we are covering the common scenarios of SQL Service startup failures and troubleshooting approach to resolve these issues:

(Kenneth Fisher) You know you can have multiple filegroups right? You might have a separate filegroup for the data (the clustered index & heaps) and another for the indexes (non-clustered indexes).

(Thomas LaRock) Last month I noticed this tweet from @SQLPrincess on #sqlhelp, asking if there was a way to find out what happened to a linked server:

(Tim Smith) We’ve witnessed possible infiltrations against a few of our ETL servers and some of our files may have experienced data additions or loss with suspicious timeframes in the file’s metadata. From looking at the timestamps of the files, these appear to be the same, but the actual size has c

(James Serra) The Azure Data Architecture Guide has just been released! Check it out: http://aka.ms/ADAG