(John Hoang, Joe Sack and Martin Lee) This article provides an overview of the Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse architecture. This new platform-as-a service (PaaS) offering provides independent compute and storage scaling on demand and is currently in public preview.

(Paul Turley) Color coordination is important in report and dashboard design. We’ve seen theming and color pallet options in the prior iteration of Power BI but this is not yet a feature in the new version.

(Tim Smith) We’re trying to identify effective ways to track SQL Server snapshot and transactional replication counts for sources and destinations.

(Pinal Dave) In standalone versions of SQL Server, if your SQL Server receives more concurrent requests than it can service simultaneously, it will queue the requests for later processing (subject to certain limits—generally available memory on the box).

(Colleen M. Morrow) SQL Server Service Broker is a messaging technology that’s baked right into the SQL Server engine. It was first introduced in SQL Server 2005, and if you ask me, is one of the most under-utilized, under-appreciated features in SQL Server.

(Chris Webb) Filtering out empty values is something that SSAS does a lot of during query execution, and it is also a common cause of performance problems.

(Kenneth Fisher) There is no short version of this. It’s LONG. It’s interesting but you might want to skip it if you are in a hurry. If you have the time however, it’s a great walk through of tuning a query.

(Ahmad Yaseen) A recent issue we faced was SQL Server blocking by a session that had a negative SPID value. When we ran sp_who2 the SPID value that was blocking was (-2).

(Scott Mattie) This is an article that I have been meaning to write for a while and I just got motivated writing it after reading Erik Darling‘s article Moving Databases with ALTER DATABASE.

(Melissa Coates) This post is part 1 of a 2-part series: