Index maintenance has always meant nightly jobs and a window you have to defend. Azure SQL’s new Automatic Index Compaction targets page density directly — so I tested it.

Compression was introduced in SQL Server version 2008. While it helped, the compression ratios were frequently too low to justify the...

Calling an API has been in Azure SQL since 2022, but it was only recently added to SQL Server 2025 Preview. This new feature...

When managing large databases or high-transactional databases, the performance of your underlying storage system is crucial, whether it...

Recently, one of my clients was experiencing performance issues with their SQL Server. Although the server was not underpowered from a...

Working with large databases, multi-terabyte in size, I've had clients who have wanted to move to the cloud. However, after testing and...

A step-by-step guide to installing SQL Server 2025 Private Preview.

If you have SQL Server 2019 or SQL Server 2022 installed with PolyBase and you try to install SQL Server 2025, it will fail during...

Today, I want to discuss a topic that has been a bit of a headache for database administrators and consultants: the changes to SQL...

After several discussions with the Microsoft team and chatting with Sunil Sabat about the testing I was conducting, the conclusion was...

To quickly summarize where we are, we started testing Microsoft Fabric with a 10GB tar file, which took over 20 hours to extract, and now...

How many of us have created a new table and used the default and first data type nvarchar for all of the text/alphanumeric fields, or had...

Since I first used Azure Data Factory, I looked for the 'disable' option on an activity, and it wasn't there! I quickly went to the ideas...

At the end of 2021, I started using the new SFTP preview feature on Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2. It was a great new addition to the...

Recently I encountered a Microsoft SQL Server with relatively high and very consistent CPU usage with few peaks and valleys. When...

Bottom line? Don't use it! At least don't use it for a SQL cluster directly. Recently I stumbled on a configuration using S2D (Storage...

For VLDBs I've always created multiple files for each file group and had to set the trace flag 1117 on to ensure that all files grow at...