HOW TO: Improve Database Performance Without Changing Code

I’ve stated before that great database performance starts with great database design. So, if you want a great database design you must find someone with great database experience. But where does a person get such experience? We already know that great judgment comes from great experience, and great experience comes from bad judgment. That means … Read more

The Five DBA Food Groups

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving here in the USA. It’s a day where we are supposed to be thankful for what we have been given and instead we mostly use it as an excuse to eat obscene amounts of food, watch 10 hours of NFL action, and force retail workers to work longer hours in the name of … Read more

Q&A From My Azure Webinar With Scott Klein

Recently (OK, on July 23rd, 2014 to be exact) I co-presented a webinar with Scott Klein (blog | @SQLScott) titled “Know Before You Go: SQL Server on Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines“. It was a repeat performance of the session we delivered at TechEd in Houston earlier this year. There were a handful of questions asked during … Read more

SQL 2014 Cardinality Estimator: Why You Should Care – Part 2

In the previous post I talked about how query optimization works, the role the Cardinality Estimator (CE) plays, and why you should care. Today I am going to break down some of the details about the differences between the old and new CE, as well as show some examples and scenarios. What’s New in the SQL 2014 … Read more

SQL 2014 Cardinality Estimator: Why You Should Care

SQL Server 2014 Cardinality Estimator

This is the first of two posts on the new Cardinality Estimator in SQL Server 2014.  SQL Server 2014 comes with a lot of shiny things. Hekaton (or as Microsoft Marketing likes to call it, In-Memory OLTP), updateable Columnstore indexes, and buffer pool extensions are some of the more common enhancements. All of those new … Read more