As promised, here are the slide deck and demo code I used for my presentation at the Bleeding Edge 2012 conference in Laško, Slovenia. Okay, I promised to have them up by Tuesday or Wednesday at worst, and it is now Saturday – my apologies for the delay. Thanks again to all the attendees of my session. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you have any ...

I asked for some names of people who you would like to see interviewed and Craig Freedman's name popped up a couple of times. I contacted Craig and he was kind enough to take time out from his busy schedule to answer these questions.  So, here are the questions. What are the most important things a person can do to master SQL ...

On December 31 of last year, I posted this brain teaser, promising to post the answer “in a few days”. Apparently, 15 is a few J.   In case you have forgotten what the puzzle was about and are too lazy to click the link above, the bottom line is that I created and populated two tables, with the same schema but different content. One held ...

Here’s a nice brain teaser, just before the end of the year. Despite the title, it is related to SQL Server, not to music!   A common misconception amongst SQL Server users is that a clustered index on a table will ensure that data is returned in the order implied by that index. I have lost count of the number of times I had to disprove ...

Greg Linwood, a fellow SQL Server MVP, has started a series of articles in which he attempts to prove that having a clustered index on each table is not a good practice. However, he has failed to include the effects of fragmentation into account, so I decided to run some tests for myself. One of those test had rather upsetting ...