(Dimitri Furman) Instant File Initialization (IFI) is a well-known feature of SQL Server, providing significant performance improvement for operations that require an increase in the size of data files, such as database creation, restore, and file growth

(Rob Farley) I want to take a few minutes to get you started with PowerShell, in a way that I think is less overwhelming than how I found most PowerShell material back in the day. Because you’ve told me you keep hearing about PowerShell, and that you can’t tell how to get into it.

(Michael J. Swart) “Above all else, show the data” says Edwarde Tufte. He’s the data visualization expert who promotes a high data-ink ratio in data visualizations. He describes data-ink as “the non-erasable core of a graphic”. In other words, avoid chartjunk.

(Grant Fritchey) SQL Server provides all different kinds of data types in order to give you more flexibility and control for how you store your data. You define these data types as you define the columns in your tables.

(Kun Lee) Once in a while, we notice there are huge SQL Server replication delays, but we do not easily notice when “Undistributed Commands” from replication monitor says “0” commands left while there is still a huge delay on the subscriber server(s). The problem was latency on the SQL Server Log Re

(Chris Webb) In the first blog post in this series a few weeks ago I mentioned that calling Excel and VBA functions from MDX came with a query performance penalty. In this post I’ll give you an illustration of this using the VBA function that I suspect is most frequently called in MDX: the RGB() fun

(Pinal Dave) If you have ever contacted me via email, you would know that I am very active in replying to emails. Many of the emails are for suggestions and I don’t get much time to help everyone, but I do reply to them letting them know the alternatives.

(MarcoDias) In this example I´ll be creating an ARM template with a couple of Azure Log Analytics tiles.

(Kenneth Fisher) Kendra Little (b/t) reminded me of this fun little trick (with fairly important ramifications) in her latest quiz on logical joins (Q7)

(Arun Sirpal) SQL Server Deadlocks – Also known as “The deadly Embrace” occurs when there are 2 processes and neither can advance and get the relevant lock it needs because the other process involved is preventing it from getting the resource it requires.