(Jason H) SQL Server Analysis Services often deals with sensitive financial numbers, sales figures, and strategic information used by businesses. Therefore it is natural to want to protect and encrypt data when is it queries to and fro from the Analysis Services over the TCP layers in Windows.

(Ben Snaidero) Ever wondered what the SQL Server explain plan for you query would look like if there were millions of records in the tables of your SQL Server database. This is a question that SQL Server database administrators (DBAs) as well as developers often ask and in most cases what they do is

(Lisa Gardner) In my last post, I went over partial database containment and contained users. This post will focus on the other piece of functionality in partial containment… collation. The collation of data determines how data is sorted and compared.

(Edwin Sarmiento) In a previous tip on New SQL Server AlwaysOn Feature – Part 1 configuration, we have seen how we can configure AlwaysOn Availability Groups. AlwaysOn Availability Groups promise to maximize your IT investments by allowing read-only workloads on the secondary replicas.

(Erik Haselhofer) This is, another, continuation from the prior day’s post. This time I’m going to group by letter on the SQL Server side of the house over a range and produce something like this,

(Kyle Burns) When dealing with any product that has been around for a while, it’s not uncommon to observe a progression of common tasks becoming less clumsy as the tools mature. In this post, I take a look at how pagination has evolved with SQL Server resultsets in order to highlight TSQL features i

(Ian Stirk) We are familiar with the idea of compressing images to reduce the storage space required and make them faster to display. Here compression is applied to database tables and indexes to improve query performance.

(Bob Pearson) This post really deals with high volume tables with an identity column, but the idea is something that everyone should at least be familiar with.

(Lisa Gardner) The concept of database containment basically means that all instance level dependencies are severed from the database. If you have ever implemented log shipping or mirroring, you are probably aware of many of these. Instance level logins, linked servers, SQL Agent jobs, SSIS packag

(johnsterrett) Typically, I am a big advocate of performance monitor but one place I commonly see performance monitor being misused is with benchmarking disk counters for SQL Server.