Designing an appropriate set of indexes can be one of the more troubling aspects of developing efficient relational database applications. Perhaps, the most important thing you can do to assure ...

SQL has dominated data querying for decades. Newer query languages offer more elegance, simplicity, and flexibility for modern use cases. For the last three decades, databases and Structured Query ...

Part of the problem is that there is no magic bullet, and for almost every best practice, I can show you at least one exception. Typically, a developer finds his or her own favorite methods — though ...

Brien M. Posey is a freelance technical writer who has contributed to dozens of books and is a six-time Microsoft MVP award winner. Many IT professionals live by the maxim that if something isn’t ...

One of the most common problems when running SQL Servers is slow queries. The help desk or database team usually hears that described as the application is slow or ...

Microsoft has just added support for query hints to Azure SQL Database, giving database administrators a powerful tool to manage the performance of ISV application code. Here's how it works. Database ...