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 ...

Microsoft’s proscriptive guidance provides a lot more detail about how much memory is needed to create a columnstore index on any given table and column. On the other hand, columnstore indexes are ...

Joey on SQL Server. How Telemetry Is Making SQL Server and Azure SQL Better: Part 1. In the first of this two-part series, Microsoft's lead SQL architect explains how the company collects -- and ...

In Azure SQL Database you can also set a HISTORY_RETENTION_PERIOD (and should be able to do it in SQL Server 2017) to control how far back in time your history will extend. Converting Existing Table ...

If you've used Azure in the past, you probably know that there are two main ways to deploy SQL Server on Microsoft's cloud—Azure SQL Database, the PaaS offering; and Azure VMs running SQL Server.

In an earlier column, I showed how to create a temporal table in SQL Server 2016 or Azure SQL Database. Once you've defined a temporal table, SQL Server automatically keeps a history of all the ...

Azure will default to the Standard pricing tier, but if you want to consider adding a higher-performance server for your SQL database, click the arrow to reveal Figure D. The basic pricing tier ...