As a Senior Oracle DBA with decades of experience optimizing databases, I was initially skeptical about AI's ability to handle the nuanced art of SQL optimization. Two days and hundreds of automated tests later, I had built a tool that proved AI could…

We’re proud to announce the general availability of Foglight® Cloud, the latest evolution of Quest’s powerful database monitoring and optimization solution. Built for today’s hybrid and cloud-first enterprises, Foglight Cloud introduces…

Constraints in SQL Server are predefined rules that you can enforce on single or multiple columns. These constraints help maintain the integrity, reliability and accuracy of values stored in these columns. You can create constraints using CREATE TABLE…

How important is database performance tuning? Well, the world essentially runs on data (the business-focused parts of it, anyway). To ensure data is easily and quickly accessible, databases need to be running efficiently and be available at all times…

In this article, we will explore what a Postgres table is, its function and the various methods for creating tables in PostgreSQL.

PostgreSQL or Postgres is a popular relational, object-oriented and open source database system. It runs on Windows, Linux…

Data is at the heart of every modern enterprise, so maintaining database performance and ensuring data is quickly and easily accessible for those who rely on it is a key responsibility for database professionals.

SQL JOIN is a clause that is used to combine multiple tables and retrieve data based on a common field in relational databases. Database professionals use normalizations for ensuring and improving data integrity. In the various normalization forms, data…

Brent Ozar, Microsoft Certified Master recently discussed parallelism in SQL Server, specifically the wait types CXPACKET and CXCONSUMER in his final installment of Quest’s Database Training Days Fall Series. In his usual humorous and accessible…

SQL Server execution plans are a gateway for query optimizer and query executions for database professionals. They reveal query processing and involved phases such as affected tables, indexes, statistics, types of joins, the number of affected rows, query…

Database monitoring is the process of collecting and using performance metrics so your database can fully support your applications by avoiding slowdowns and responding immediately to queries. Database professionals who know the right metrics and track…

As part of Quest’s Database Training Days Fall Series, Brent Ozar, Microsoft Certified Master recently presented a tutorial on “Avoiding Deadlocks with Query Tuning.” The program focused on the three concurrency issues that occur in SQL Server,…

The availability, accessibility and performance of data are vital to business success. Performance tuning and SQL query optimization are tricky, but necessary practices for database professionals. They require looking at various collections of data using…

As anyone who manages databases knows all too well, SQL Server performance tuning is a critical function to ensuring optimal performance. With performance dependent upon various factors such as memory, configuration, query design and resource usage, isolating…

In SQL Server, the buffer cache is the memory that allows you to query frequently accessed data quickly. When data is written to or read from a SQL Server database, the buffer manager copies it into the buffer cache (aka the buffer pool). When it’s full…

A SQL Server execution plan is useful for investigating performance issues with your queries. Database professionals often receive trouble tickets or user complaints that queries are running slowly. Query results that used to take two or three minutes…

As a CIO, you’re on the firing line when your organization’s cloud service costs are rising at the same time that your cloud application performance is falling.

“Wait, what?” you wonder. “Shouldn’t that be the other way around?”…

Database professionals are routinely confronted with database performance issues like improper indexing and poorly written code in production SQL instances. Suppose you updated a transaction and SQL Server reported the following deadlock message. For…

In relational databases, we create tables to store data in various formats. SQL Server stores data in a row and column format which holds a value associated with each data type. When we design SQL tables, we define data types such as integer, float, decimal…

Performance tuning a database is mostly a science, but with cloud vs. on-premises databases it’s more like an art. You have to take into account the type of organization, the individuals performing the tuning and the systems involved.

You also need…

In a previous article, we explored SQL Server index requirements and performance considerations. When it comes to database performance, performance tuning is without question, one of the most important and complex functions. It consists of many different…

With the rapid adoption of cloud database migration, many database professionals have concerns and questions regarding their futures and career prospects in database management. We recently had the opportunity to sit down with two industry veterans– Brent…

If you pride yourself on your SQL optimization skills, then this is a good time to advance your MySQL performance tuning.

For one thing, MySQL has spent the last seven years as a very close #2 in the race with #1- Oracle and #3- Microsoft SQL Server,…

SQL Server indexes are used to help retrieve data quicker and reduce bottlenecks impacting critical resources. Indexes on a database table serve as a performance optimization technique. You may wonder – how do indexes increase query performance? Are there…

If anyone had any doubts that a panel discussion where Brent Ozar and Pinal Dave would be answering attendees’ SQL Server performance questions would be a success, those were quickly dispelled during the blockbuster Ask the Experts session Quest hosted…

Why is SQL performance tuning so important to database management?

Because it can save you money big time. Bear with me and you’ll see how.

Most database professionals spend…