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 ...

When working as an engineer, you will surprisingly often have opportunities to interact with databases. From application ...

Let's break down when it's ideal to use the NOLOCK hint and when you should never use it. As a consultant, I work on wide swaths of database systems, which means I get to see many, many SQL statements ...

SQL Server is primarily built around a row-based table structure that connects related data elements in different tables to one another, avoiding the need to redundantly store data in multiple places ...

This book aims “…to provide a comprehensive introduction to SQL Server that is friendly to beginners.” How does it fare? The book’s introduction suggests that both new and existing SQL Server users ...

With the latest public preview available, it’s time to decide if you want to upgrade to Microsoft’s most cloud-connected version of SQL Server so far. Three decades on, SQL Server is still a database ...

Microsoft today released SQL Server 2022, the latest version of its database software, which originally launched more than 33 years ago. Microsoft describes this release as the “most Azure-enabled ...

SQL, or the structured query language, is a specialized programming language designed for working with databases. There are a few different variations of SQL from different organizations and projects, ...

Microsoft complements its relational database engine, SQL Server, with several add-on services that manage different aspects of enterprise business intelligence and information processing such as data ...