An update to the cardinality estimator feature in SQL Server 2022 will be one of the biggest changes to the database engine since its inception. Database engines like SQL Server are incredibly complex ...

Often, designing databases and speeding up SQL Server queries are treated as a kind of abstract problem: A just "Find this problem, apply this solution" approach to problem solving. In practice, ...

As I discussed in an earlier column, SQL Server keeps a plan cached for each query it sees (assuming the query requires planning in the first place, of course). That's great for speeding up processing ...

Perhaps a bit of an esoteric problem but... I have a SQL Server 2008 instance on EC2 (running on 2008 R2) under heavy load. I'm trying to optimize I/O performance and after a couple iterations I'm ...

In a modern enterprise data environment, the increasing volume of data, distributed architecture, and complex application dependencies challenge traditional query-tuning methods. Observability ...

SQL Server 2025 delivers major performance upgrades alongside licensing changes that can reshape both operational speed and budget strategy. Smarter query execution, refined CPU scheduling, and better ...