We are familiar with the idea of compressing images to reduce the storage space required and make them faster to display. Here compression is applied to database tables and indexes to improve query ...

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 ...

OK, so it’s one week to Christmas and I have to resort to a holiday theme of some sort. Things are a bit laid back this year. Our family has resorted to the Secret Santa thing to reduce the number of ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Knowing what you want from SQL Server is probably the biggest step toward running it successfully in business applications, according to consultant Koen Verbeeck. It's not just about knowing how SQL ...