(Pinal Dave) Getting into a consulting business has its own set of challenges that I cherish big time. Recently I was consulted by a product team that had some of the best guys in the market. I was surprised why they might need my services. But I had an open mind to go through what they were doing.

(Denny Cherry) Having too many NUMA nodes can lead to some really strange CPU behavior. What you’ll probably see is that the CPU workload of the machine isn’t evenly balanced across the CPUs.

(Kenneth Fisher) Foreign keys are a classic method of enforcing RI (Referential Integrity). Unfortunately though, they can get in the way if you have to reload data in a table.

(Gethyn Ellis) In an earlier post I introduced the SQL Server umbrella and briefly discussed a number of products that make up the SQL Server stack. One of those products and a key element of the SQL Server family is SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). SQL Server Reporting Services is Microsoft’s

(johnsterrett) There are a lot of new features in SQL Server 2016. Availability Groups by itself got a lot of new features. Being that I am the founder of the High Availability and Disaster Recovery Virtual Chapter, I plan on blogging about the new availability group features.

(Dinesh Asanka) Disabling column store indexes needs to be done time to time. Following query will generate the script.

(Pinal Dave) The best part of learning is by the error messages that each one of you send me over the years. These are a great source of experimentation and a lot of searching to get to the appropriate error resolution.

(Kenneth Fisher) The cloud can be expensive. I had this hammered home the other day by a simple mistake. I’m currently working with Microsoft’s Azure platform and using one of the free credit options.

(Tim Smith) We use some maintenance tools which tell us when tables need their statistics updated and we wanted to know if we could build some tools to automate updating statistics on tables outside of maintenance schedules, on the basis of when we receive the alerts from these tools.

(Jimmy Wong) We recently released the multi-version support (also known as One Designer) in SSDT 2015, which allows SSIS developers to author, execute, deploy and debug multiple versions of SSIS package from a single version of SSDT designer.