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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

If you've just started writing SQL Server queries, there's a good chance you probably wrote a query, saw it return the right ...

The structured query language is a powerful tool for connecting to many database systems that store data in tables organized into rows and columns. It's often used on the backend of business websites ...