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 ...

Microsoft has just added support for query hints to Azure SQL Database, giving database administrators a powerful tool to manage the performance of ISV application code. Here's how it works. Database ...

With the latest public preview available, it’s time to decide if you want to upgrade to Microsoft’s most cloud-connected version of SQL Server so far. Three decades on, SQL Server is still a database ...

Microsoft today released SQL Server 2022, the latest version of its database software, which originally launched more than 33 years ago. Microsoft describes this release as the “most Azure-enabled ...

A common SQL habit is to use SELECT * on a query, because it’s tedious to list all the columns you need. Plus, sometimes those columns may change over time, so why not just do things the easy way? But ...

With SQL Server 2016, you can store JSON objects in your rows. Here’s how to work with JSON objects, including how to update them once you’ve found them. In a previous Practical .NET column I showed ...

SQL is neither the fastest nor the most elegant way to talk to databases, but it is the best way we have. Here’s why Today, Structured Query Language is the standard means of manipulating and querying ...