(Kenneth Fisher) One of the really cool things about the cloud is how quickly you can spin up a new machine to work with. In the case of SQL Server professionals we want SQL Server installed on that machine, and the easiest way to get it is to one of the default templates provided by Microsoft.

(Jason Thomas) Hi readers, Happy New Year! It’s been a while since I blogged and a lot of changes have happened in the last one year, including me moving to Microsoft as a BI Technology Solution Professional in the Healthcare Vertical. As part of my new role, I get to spend a lot of time with custom

(Pinal Dave) Since I started consulting, I never had “Monday Blues” because I don’t get any weekends. I am always ready to help without time boundaries. Consulting gives me exposure to real customer issue, learn more and blog more.

(Jason Brimhall) A common question that I am asked about Extended Events relates to what kind of permissions are required in order to use this awesome feature. In this article, I am going to compare and contrast the permissions required for Profiler as well as Extended Events.

(Manoj Pandey) ColumnStore Indexes were first introduced in SQL Server 2012, and this created a new way to store and retrieve the Index or Table data in an efficient manner.

(Jorg Klein) Modern data analytics platforms often follow a hub and spoke architecture in which a data hub is used as central data ingestion area that contains all data, usually in raw format. Data spokes deliver data to the majority of the end users in a data store that meets their specific require

(Chris Webb) If you’re performance tuning SSAS Multidimensional Storage Engine issues, the Resource Usage Profiler event can provide a lot of useful information about what’s going on behind the scenes when you run a query.

(Glenn Berry) Several years ago, Microsoft published a very useful Knowledge Base article about how to configure SQL Server 2012 and SQL Server 2014 for the best performance with heavy workloads on larger sized, modern server hardware.

(Pinal Dave) Recently I got called in by a regular customer for my On Demand (50 minutes) service. Every single day I keep two hours available to help DBAs who need urgent help with SQL Server.

(James Serra) There have been a number of enhancements to Hadoop recently when it comes to fast interactive querying with such products as Hive LLAP and Spark SQL which are being used over slower interactive querying options such as Tez/Yarn and batch processing options such as MapReduce (see Azure