(Sharon Bjeletich) Query optimization is one of the most important skills in your system performance and scalability toolkit, and correct index usage is one of the most effective ways to get good query execution plans. Queries need efficient on-disk access paths to minimize I/O, which then will also

(Gregory A. Larsen) To ensure that queries run as efficiently as possible, the database administrator needs to monitor performance to find inefficient queries. This article focuses on exploring how a DBA can monitor the I/Os against an instance of SQL Server, using Dynamic Management Objects, or mor

(Pinalkumar Dave) Self Join has always been an note-worthy case. It is interesting to ask questions on self join in a room full of developers. I often ask – if there are three kind of joins, i.e.- Inner Join, Outer Join and Cross Join; what type of join is Self Join? The usual answer is that it is a

(Ranga Narasimhan) In my work place, we have Data Analyst/Data Integration people who constantly import Excel files into SQL for queries. Instead of importing the data to SQL Server, is there another way to query an Excel file using SQL Server tools?

(Ken Lassesen) This is the second part in a series of posts about the data collector in SQL Server 2008. In this post, I will list the measurements that are available from the data collector. This may seem like a strange post, but I could not find this information anywhere on the Internet.

(Bru Medishetty) SQL Server 2008 introduced data compression and backup compression. Can you explain the impact of data compression when used with backup compression?

(Simon Sabin) You can control what appears on your tabs from SQL 2008 onwards. Its still not ideal, IMHO you need to have multi line tabs to show server, database, filename etc.

(Alex Kuznetsov) I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from this book, mostly because I don’t think of myself primarily as a database programmer, I know how to write procedures and functions, how to manage a range of SQL Servers of various versions and editions and I can design a database for the mo

(Marcin Policht) How to Implement Package Variables in SQL Server 2008 illustrated how to leverage package variables in order to promote code reusability. This was accomplished by replacing hard-coded values assigned to properties of individual package components (such as database connection strings

(martijnh) Recently, I had to implement an SSIS package which imports some data into SQL Server from MSMQ. It turns out reading MSMQ from within an SSIS package is more difficult than it seems at first. I’ve documented how to get things working because I could find little other documentation.