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 ...

First introduced in SQL Server 2012, columnstore indexes can give you major performance gains -- provided you have the right workloads. Here's how columnstore indexes work and what types of data work ...

SQL Server 2012 includes a lot of new and exciting features. One feature that has caught the imagination of many in the user community is the high-performance feature called Columnstore Indexes.

Microsoft directly hosts a handful of big conferences every year, with the developer-oriented Build conference and infrastructure-oriented Ignite being to two that I pay the most attention to. The ...