One of the most common problems when running SQL Servers is slow queries. The help desk or database team usually hears that described as the application is slow or the database is slow. In the ...

SQL Server performance is slow. Users are complaining. Your boss wants to know what's going on and what you can do to improve SQL Server performance. Where do you start? Which SQL Server query should ...

There are some queries where it’s difficult for SQL Server to make a good estimate of what the cardinality will be, so it gets the cost wrong.

Want faster SQL queries? Here are nine best practices for writing SQL queries that work like a charm (or at least, like they should).

I have a test server hosting several sites using SQL Server Express and SQL Management Studio Express. I've seen one site have an occasional issue where queries to a particular table (the ...

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.

If you want to speed up your SQL Server queries you need to know how your application and your users actually use your database.

To verify this, I registered three servers in SSMS 2008, one SQL Server 2000, one SQL Server 2005 and one SQL Server 2008. I then ran queries through the Multi-Server Query interface with a single ...

However, there are any number of queries in any application that SQL Server may never see again (at least in, for example, the next 24 hours). The plans for these "one-time" queries are taking up ...

Everyone wants faster database queries, and both SQL developers and DBAs can turn to many time-tested methods to achieve that goal. Unfortunately, no single method is foolproof or ironclad. But ...