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 ...

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 ...

SQL Server 2012 has a lot of metadata about columnstore indexes. For example, sys.indexes show column store indexes as type = 6 and type_desc as ‘NONCLUSTERED COLUMNSTORE.’ There also are two new ...

Missing indexes are one reason why an SQL query takes longer (much longer) to complete. Here's how to find out about them and fix the problem. In my previous article, Identifying your slowest SQL ...

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 ...

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 ...

A practical guide to how databases work, covering schema design, SQL, indexing, transactions, concurrency, caching, pagination, and database selection.

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