(Simon Sabin) I was interested reading a post on the MVP group about DISTINCT FROM by Erland who was championing the IS DISTINCT FROM clause but had found a work around using INTERSECT.

(Ashish Kumar Mehta) TRUNCATE TABLE and DELETE are T-SQL statements with similar functions, but that doesn’t make them interchangeable. They operate differently and use different amounts of SQL Server resources.

(Pinal Dave) I am really having fun working with customers who are pushing the learning barrier in my new consulting role. The more customers I meet; merrier I am because I am getting interesting challenges that push me from the normal comfort zone I am in.

(Ben Snaidero) I have a SQL Server stored procedure that sometimes completes in under a second and other times takes over 15 seconds. I’ve looked at the EXPLAIN PLAN for the stored procedure and all the columns in the statements are indexed, so I suspect parameter sniffing might be the issue. How ca

(Manoj Pandey) So now as SQL Server 2016 is released (on 1-June-2016) and is in market for few days, so Microsoft team has released a new Sample Database “WideWorldImporters” specially for learning and working with new features of SQL Server 2016 and Azure SQL Database.

(Rob Farley) I wrote previously about the Actual Rows Read property. It tells you how many rows are actually read by an Index Seek, so that you can see how selective the Seek Predicate is, compared to the selectiveness of the Seek Predicate plus Residual Predicate combined.

(Pinal Dave) I hardly get questions around the cluster and I try to keep away from the queries because some of these can lead to some deep level working with cluster. Some conversations can lead to a great learning experience.

(Marios Philippopoulos) While troubleshooting a performance issue in my SQL Server instance I noticed a high percentage of RESOURCE_SEMAPHORE waits. This wait type indicates contention for memory resources by concurrent queries requesting memory grants due to Hash-Match and/or Sort operations.

(Pinal Dave) As a part of my passion, I do visit the forums and try to help. I contacted him personally via email and found an interesting situation. So, sharing it via the blog. I saw below post in a public forum about TDSSNIClient Initialization Failed.

(Rob Sewell) When I was at PowerShell Conference EU in Hannover last month (The videos are available now – click here and the slides and code here) I found out about Irwin Strachans Active Directory Operations Test which got me thinking.