(Nitish Nagpal) Deciding when to use SQL Trace depends on the specific goals and requirements for the environment that you’re looking at. A question that you should ask yourself is can the same objectives be obtained through dynamic management objects?

(Koen Verbeeck) SQL Server 2016 comes with the integration of the popular language R built into the database engine. This feature has been introduced in SQL Server 2016 preview CTP3.0 and is called SQL Server R Services.

(Uwe Ricken) When your SQL Server database is set to have its statistics automatically updated, you will probably conclude that, whenever the distribution statistics are out-of-date, they will be updated before the next query is executed against that index or table. Curiously, this isn’t always the

(Ashish Kumar Mehta) SQL Server 2014 includes the buffer pool extension feature, which can speed up query performance.

(Pinal Dave) To error is human and sometimes the errors / mistakes we make can easily put our jobs at stake. Such horror stories are something I keep hearing from people and they are super cool in a way because you learn from their experiences.

(Niladri Biswas) Patindex is a SQL Server function which returns the first occurance of the location of a pattern in a string. The pattern search is not case sensitive. It is very useful in many situations. In this article, we will look into some of the usages of this function.

(Daniel Calbimonte) There are new features for Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) in SQL Server 2016 and in this tip we will look at a few of these new DAX functions.

(Jon Gallant) The Durable Task Framework (DTF) is a workflow execution framework that is based on async/await and backed by Azure Service Bus. I was recently in need of a long running workflow engine and wanted to take advantage of all the async/await goodness.

(Richard Carr) SQL Server Management Studio allows multiple concurrent connections to different servers and instances. This can be risky when connecting to live, test and development systems at the same time.

(Pinal Dave) ApexSQL Backup is a powerful yet simple tool for Microsoft SQL Server which represents a fully equipped command center for database backup and restore jobs management. It enables users to create and schedule backup related jobs (backup, restore, log shipping, index defragmentation…) and