One of the more gut-wrenching experiences of a DBA is to have a database get stuck in recovery. This typically happens when the server was rebooted unexpectedly and typically coincides with a rather large transaction.
Database In Recovery Redux
Indexed Views – Performance Panacea or Plight
An indexed view is a view where the result set from the query (the view definition) becomes materialized in lieu of the virtual table result set of a standard (non-indexed) view. Many times we see that an indexed view would be created to help improve performance. Far too often, an indexed view is created without consideration for the costs of the indexed view.
Connect To SQL Server – Back to Basics
The first critical task any data professional should ever learn how to do is how to connect to SQL Server. Without a connection to SQL Server, there is barely anything one could do to be productive in the data professional world (for SQL Server).
An Experiment with Deadlocks
There seems to be a myth out there that when deadlocks come a-knocking, then just throw this little directive (ROWLOCK) at it and all will be well. This is total fiction and we will explore that in this article.
The Curiously Large CASE Statement
A powerful little expression in SQL Server is the CASE statement. The CASE statement has the ability to “transform” data per business rules to help better understand the data in a given query. In the simplest form, the CASE statement is a statement that evaluates a list of conditions (in order) and returns the first matching result expressions.