(Grant Fritchey) Data Definition Language queries don’t go through the optimizer, right? While normally, my short answer to this question in the past would have been, yes. However, with testing comes knowledge and I want to be sure about the statement.

(Kathi Kellenberger) KPIs have been around in SSRS in some fashion for most releases. Row level indicators and gauges were added in 2008 R2, but even before that, you could roll-your-own KPIs with images and a small amount of custom code.

(Sunil Agarwal) SQL product team has made significant improvements in columnstore index functionality, supportability and performance during SQL Server 2016 based on the feedback from customers. This blog series focuses on the performance improvements done as part of SQL Server 2016.

(Joshua Feierman) If you need to run SQL Server in an Azure Virtual Machine, your choice of Azure storage will have a great effect on its performance. If performance is important, you are likely to discover complications and barriers in the storage options when you come to provision the server. If y

(Erin Stellato) One of the many new features introduced back in SQL Server 2008 was Data Compression. Compression at either the row or page level provides an opportunity to save disk space, with the trade off of requiring a bit more CPU to compress and decompress the data.

(Angel Gomez) One of the most important tasks of any SQL Server DBA is to validate database backups are occurring in their environments. When we have an environment with hundreds or thousands of databases supported by dozens of SQL Server instances, it is physically impossible to control the perfor

(Steve Endow) If you use SQL Server Management Studio, I’ve assembled a few helpful tips that can help you save time and work more efficiently.

(JackLi) In support, we frequently have customers who call us and want to find out why a particular query doesn’t use parallelism. Recently, we had a user who wanted to know why his index rebuild didn’t use parallelism. In some cases, NonParallelPlanReason in query plan tells you the reason.

(Melissa Coates) This is part 3 of a discussion about a new service in Microsoft Azure: Azure Analysis Services. Azure AS is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering which is in public preview mode (as of December 2016).

(Rick Dobson) I read about the GOOGLEFINANCE function with Google Sheets as a convenient way to get historical and current data for stocks. Please demonstrate a solution for passing data for a bunch of stocks from the Google Finance site to a SQL Server database using the GOOGLEFINANCE function in G