(Grant Fritchey) One of the most frequent questions you’ll hear online is how to determine if a particular index is in use. There is no perfect answer to this question.

(Pinal Dave) Resolving the Last Page Insert PAGELATCH_EX Contention Due to the Identity Column is always a topic to be discussed during my Comprehensive Database Performance Health Check. I will discuss the solution the future blog posts, our today’s goal is to understand what is the Last Page Inser

(Esat Erkec) In this article, we will learn the basics of Parallel Execution Plans, and we will also figure out how the query optimizer decides to generate a parallel query plan for the queries.

(Matteo Lorini) Sometimes there is a need to export data for a lot of different SQL Server tables into an Excel file. In this tip we look at how we can quickly export several tables into one Excel workbook where each table is stored in a different worksheet.

(Daniel Janik) Twenty something years ago when I started my SQL Server career there was an amazing tool called Query Analyzer.

(Kenneth Fisher) A good friend of mine (Randolph West (blog|twitter) asked that someone Explain CROSS APPLY like they are 5. So, here’s my attempt. No promises on the 5 but I’m going to at least aim for 10.

(Pinal Dave) Every single day, when I write blog posts, I am not sure what I will write tomorrow but I must express my gratitude to all of you, who keep on asking questions new interesting questions which made me write more.

(Rob Farley) …you know the one. In SSMS it looks like this:

(Vitor Montalvao) I need my VMs to have the ability to recover from failures and continue to function in a way that avoids downtime or data loss. How can I achieve that in Azure?

(Pinal Dave) When I write blog posts, I am never sure how popular they will get and who will read them. It seems my recent blog post about oStress has got lots of popularity.