Most Popular Databases

SQL Server Express as a Production Database

There are a lot of misperceptions and misinformation about Microsoft’s SQL Server® Express edition. Some of these misperceptions are holdovers from the limitations of previous releases, and others stem from misunderstandings about the product’s features and licensing. In this article, I’ll tackle some of the myths about using SQL Server Express as a production database, […]

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Three Ways to Counter Parameter Sniffing Problems

When I started working with SQL Server® almost ten years ago, various aspects of performance tuning had to be taken into account. Since that time, there has been a lot of talk about parameter sniffing, but not many people really know what that means. I intend to change that with this blog. What is the […]

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How to Write Performance Monitor Data to SQL Server

When you are creating a system benchmark you need a place to store your benchmark data and when you’re collecting SQL Server performance data what better place could there be than SQL Server? Performance Monitor is your primary tool for collecting performance data and Performance Monitor has the capability of writing performance data to SQL […]

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Using the SQL Server Resource Governor to Manage I/O

In large enterprises and multi-tenant environments controlling the resources that are used by a given workload or application can be an important factor in meeting your SLAs. If one workload consumes too large a chuck of your system’s resources then all of the other workloads running on that host could be adversely affected. That’s where […]

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How and When to Use SQL Server FILESTREAM Datatypes–Part 2

The FILESTREAM data type is SQL Server’s principle BLOB storage technology. The FILESTREAM data type lets you combine native NTFS file system performance with relational database data integrity. It supports up to 16 TB files which maximum file size supported by the NTFS file systems and simultaneously provides you with full data consistency. The FILESTREAM […]

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How and When to Use SQL Server FILESTREAM Datatypes–Part 1

Combining Binary Large Object (BLOBs) with relational databases like SQL Server has always been like combining oil and water. They just don’t mix very well. BLOB objects like pictures, videos, text documents and xml documents don’t fit within the standard relational data types. SQL Server originally offered support for BLOBs using the TEXT, NTEXT and […]

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Defining Constraints within CREATE TABLE in Oracle 12c

You can use the CREATE TABLE statement to enforce several different kinds of constraints on a table: candidate keys, primary keys, foreign keys, and check conditions. A CONSTRAINT clause can constrain a single column or group of columns in a table. The point of these constraints is to get Oracle to do most of the work […]

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How to Enable Oracle 12c Flashback Database

With Flashback Database, you can rewind the database to a previous point in time without media recovery (that is, without restoring backup copies of the datafiles). When the database is running, Flashback Database buffers and writes before-images of data blocks to flashback logs, which are generated by default for all permanent tablespaces and which reside […]

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