As I described here, Power BI can send SQL queries in parallel in DirectQuery mode and you can see from the Timeline column there is some parallelism happening here – the last two SQL queries ...

A common SQL habit is to use SELECT * on a query, because it’s tedious to list all the columns you need. Plus, sometimes those columns may change over time, so why not just do things the easy way? But ...

Forge 2025.3 adds AI Assistant to SQL Complete, supports SSMS 22, Visual Studio 2026, MySQL 9.5, MariaDB 12.2, and ...

In part 1 of my SQL Server 2022 features series, you learned about the improvements to the cardinality estimator component of query optimization. In this installment, you will learn about another ...

Part of the problem is that there is no magic bullet, and for almost every best practice, I can show you at least one exception. Typically, a developer finds his or her own favorite methods — though ...

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 ...

Although tables in SQL databases typically contain massive amounts of data, they’re not always in a format that can be used by data analysts. The data records in these tables need to be filtered ...