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 ...

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 ...

Using table indexes in databases enables you to find information within the database faster and more efficiently than not using table indexes. The two index types that are commonly used in database ...

Microsoft’s proscriptive guidance provides a lot more detail about how much memory is needed to create a columnstore index on any given table and column. On the other hand, columnstore indexes are ...

I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you want to speed up your application, don't look at your code, look at your data access. The two slowest things you can do in application development are ...

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 Server 2016 and Azure SQL Database both give you tables that automatically keep track of the history of your data. Here's how to retrieve that historical data. In an earlier column, I showed how ...

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 ...