You Can’t Marry Your Database, But You Can Have Relations

There’s something you should know about relational databases. They were designed to store data efficiently, protecting the quality of the data written and stored to disk. I’ve written before about relational engines favoring data quality and integrity, and how relational databases were not designed for the reading of data. Of course, if you are going through the trouble … Read more

SQL Plan Warnings

SQL Plan Warnings

There are many methods available for optimizing the performance of SQL Server. One method in particular is examining your plan cache, looking for query plan warnings. Plan warnings include implicit conversions, key or RID lookups, and missing indexes to name a few. Each of these warnings is the optimizer giving you the opportunity to take … Read more

Why AWS and Azure Benchmarks Don’t Matter to Me

AWS and Azure benchmark

Last October I wrote a review of the Gigaom SQL Transactional Processing Price-Performance test. That post references the original data warehouse test also published by Gigaom. I believe both Gigaom reports were funded by Microsoft. I found the first report on data warehousing to be of good quality. The SQL transaction report had some weak … Read more

Reviewing the GigaOM SQL Transactional Processing Price-Performance Testing

Reviewing the GigaOM SQL Transactional Processing Price-Performance Testing

Earlier this month Microsoft and GigaOM announced a new benchmark study comparing AWS RDS to Azure SQL Database. This study was authored by the same people that wrote the previous GigaOM data warehouse benchmark last year. I enjoyed the data warehouse study. I found it to be fair and thorough enough to help the reader … Read more