How to leverage the new .NET classes provided in the Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Trace namespace to start and stop profiler traces and receive events in real time from SQL Server 2005...

I'd like to take some time today to explain some of the seemingly arbitrary limits placed on the XML data type, specifically those related to ID/IDREF validation, complex XML Schema types, the depth limit for XML data, and the enigmatic "XSD schema too...

This series of posts will discuss some TSQL semantics and language features that may confuse some users new to TSQL. Specially those users familiar with other popular imperative programming languages and familiar with the SQL query language, but not familiar...

This blog describes how the SCHEMABINDING option specified during creation of T-SQL UDFs may affect query plans involving these UDFs in SQL Server 2005. Armed with this knowledge, you may find that you can dramatically improvement your query performance for free....

A typical programmer may expect that the predicates are always evaluated in the order that they are specified, but this is not true in database systems. For example, for the following clause, where col11 = 5 and convert(int, col2) = 100 programmers...

Procedure cache which is also called as plan cache is primarily a cache of the query plans to improve performance of query execution. By caching the compiled and execution plans we don’t have compile query each time they are executed. This is a huge performance...

Plan guides are used to optimize the performace of a query without modifying it. They are intended for advanced users and help in situations where a query submitted through an application can not be changed. For more details on this feature please visit...

MARS is a new programming interface introduced in SQL Server 2005. It enables multiple result sets to exist at the same time for a given connection. To say it in a simple way, you can make a connection to server and then submit multiple requests to server...