Have you ever wanted to try out SQL Server Availability Groups but never had enough spare tin lying around in order to setup an environment? Well the Azure portal has been updated and now you don’t need to have any physical kit lying around, nor do you need to worry about having a beefed up laptop..

Under the SQL Server 2012 licencing terms running a data warehouse on the BI edition of SQL Server did not make sense if your source databases were licensed per core.

Last week I worked with a client that wants to continue running their mission critical Point of Sales system on a server first procured in 2006 for another two years. I had a catch up with a non-technical project manager who seemed to think that server compute power wasn’t an issue because the..

As a SQL Server DBA, you may be working in environment that is monitored by System Center Operations Manager. If so, you’ll probably spend a lot of time in building a monitoring platform and configuring it to ensure that the DBA team get woken up when things start (or about to start) going wrong.

IT vendors increasingly use reviews from analyst firms in their marketing - how should we interpret these?

Working with 30000 data files in one database – why do my log backups take so long?

This is a quick post about measuring query performance. How do you know that changes you’ve made to improve a query are actually beneficial? If all you’re doing is sitting there with a stop watch or watching the timer in the bottom right corner of SQL Server Management Studio then you’re doing it..

Welcome to part three of the PDW Shallow dive. In this section I am going to explore partitioning in PDW. We will look at how to partition a table on the appliance and how to use partition switching. Unfortunately I was hoping to look at the CTAS function and specifically the mega merge statement..

Let me introduce you to an interesting story that was part of the foreword of the Mike Cohn book “Succeeding with Agile: Software Development with Scrum”. In the story, trappers would stop off at the Hudson Bay store to get all their supplies before setting off into the wilderness and make their..