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

Thoughts on the VividCortex Acquisition

VividCortex and SolarWinds

Last month, SolarWinds completed the purchase of VividCortex, a database performance monitoring solution for popular open source systems such as PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MySQL, Amazon Aurora, and Redis. I was fortunate to visit Austin about a week after the purchase. During my visit I met with members of the VividCortex team. We had deep discussions about … 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

SQL Injection Protection

sql-injection-example-feature

SQL injection is a common form of data theft. I am hopeful we can make SQL injection protection more common. The 2018 TrustWave Global Security Report listed SQL Injection as the second most common technique for web attacks, trailing only cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. This is a 38% increase from the previous year. That same … Read more

Updated Analytics and Big Data Comparison: AWS vs. Azure

analytics and big data comparison aws versus azure

Building upon my earlier post, today I want to share with you the updated graphic and links for the analytics and big data services offered by Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. It is my hope that this post will be a starting guide for you when you need to research these analytic and big … Read more