The most important performance-tuning technique available is having the needed indexes created on the tables to ensure that the SQL Server database engine is able to get the data that it needs to as ...

First introduced in SQL Server 2012, columnstore indexes can give you major performance gains -- provided you have the right workloads. Here's how columnstore indexes work and what types of data work ...

OK, I’ll admit it. I’m not a DBA, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t overseen databases and their performance. I was (and probably still am) the guy who installed a Microsoft SQL database by hitting Next ...

The indexes on a the tables of a large database make a huge difference in its performance and utility. Without an index, locating a single record in a large table can take several seconds; with the ...

While SQL Server 2008 was little more than a service-pack level upgrade, the 2012 version of Microsoft’s database has a boatload of new features and delivers solid performance improvements.

Technology Toolbox: VB.NET, C#, SQL Server "Yukon" All versions of SQL Server prior to SQL Server "Yukon" provide two ways to write procedural code that executes inside the database. The usual way is ...

Relational SQL databases, which have been around since the 1980s, historically ran on mainframes or single servers—that’s all we had. If you wanted the database to handle more data and run faster, you ...

SQL is neither the fastest nor the most elegant way to talk to databases, but it is the best way we have. Here’s why Today, Structured Query Language is the standard means of manipulating and querying ...