April 2008
Uncover more valuable metadata that can aid you in troubleshooting and performance-tuning your queries.
February 2008
Column statistics—statistics on unindexed table columns—complement index statistics and give the optimizer additional information to use in determining the most efficient query plans.
January 2008
A large plan cache can seriously impact performance. By using plan-cache metadata in SQL Server 2005, you can analyze any user query without actually running the query and avoid expensive queries by comparing many plans at once.
December 2007
Changes in plan caching over successive versions of SQL Server affect its memory usage.
December 2007
SQL Server 2005 doesn’t limit plan-cache size but still provides ways to control it. Learn how to keep an eye on cache size and tricks to trim down a bloated cache to improve performance.
October 2007
Tune performance by using UPDATE STATISTICS and trace flags to improve the quality of index statistics by ensuring they’re regularly updated.
September 2007
By using both TEMPLATE plan guides, which enable autoparameterization, and SQL plan guides, which let you specify many query-processing hints, you can optimize query performance.
August 2007
Two query hints in SQL Server will autoparameterize queries so that query plans can be reused, but you need to keep a close eye on query performance to get the most benefit from these hints.
July 19, 2007
By default, SQL Server 2005 will not autoparameterize queries containing the constructs in this list.
July 2007
SQL Server 2005 plan guides let you instruct the optimizer about when to use a particular hint, to boost a query's performance—but you should use them sparingly.
June 2007
Here's how to simulate multiple processors by changing a setting in SQL Server Configuration Manager, so that you can examine plans for parallel queries.
June 2007
Viewing SQL Server 2005 query plans in XML format gives you more-detailed insights into query performance, and Microsoft's free XML Notepad 2007 tool makes such plans easier to read.
June 2007
Kalen Delaney, whose Inside SQL Server column has been an integral part of SQL Server Magazine since the first issue, reminisces about the magazine’s origins.
April 2007
Identify and implement missing-index groups to tune your queries, and use SQL Server 2005's XML Showplan output feature to examine detailed missing-index information.
March 2007
Investigate the metadata that SQL Server 2005 dynamic management objects provides about missing indexes and use that information to improve query performance.
February 2007
Some SQL Server behaviors change in subtle ways from version to version. Learn about three such changes that might surprise you.
January 2007
In SQL Server 2005, a single-table query can show as a join operation in a query plan, even when no JOIN operator is specified. Learn more about how the optimizer treats such queries, by using either a nonclustered index or multiple indexes on a table.
December 2006
SQL Server 2005 optimizes the use of version-store data with triggers, but you'll need to watch tempdb's size when using triggers combined with snapshot isolation.
November 2006
Row-level versioning can stress your tempdb database—but you can mitigate the increased demand by monitoring tempdb usage using SQL Server 2005 tools.
October
The more you know about SQL Server's inner workings, the better-equipped you'll be to troubleshoot problems and administer your databases efficiently.
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