Extended Events is a general event-handling system for performance monitoring that was introduced in SQL Server 2008.  It has a highly scalable and highly configurable architecture that allows users to collect as much or as little information as is nece...

Given two types of underlying data sources (a data warehouse and a OLAP cube built from the data warehouse) there are many different possible presentation layers (client tools) that serve different user communities with varying usage profiles.  There is...

FileTable is a new feature in SQL Server 2012 that is built on top of SQL Server FILESTREAM technology, which allows BLOB data to be stored as individual files separate from a database’s data files.  Interactions with the FileStream files took pla...

Version 2 of PowerPivot (download) is being made available with SQL Server 2012.  There are many new features, and my top 5 are: Diagram View – Instead of looking at the defined relationships in a list format, v2 allows you to view the relationsh...

Microsoft StreamInsight, first introduced in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, is a way to effectively analyze large amounts of event data streaming in from multiple sources.  You can derive insights from critical information in near real-time.  StreamInsig...

SQL Server 2012 has a number of new T-SQL features.  Listed below are all of the new features, along with the best links I have found that describe each feature: WITH RESULT SETS, OFFSET AND FETCH, THROW, SEQUENCE: See New T-SQL Features in SQL Server ...

A problem that has plagued SQL Server for a long time is that a database is not very portable.  Sure, you can backup or detach a database and restore or attach it elsewhere, but when you do that, you are missing a lot of the pieces that make that databa...

SQL Azure is a cloud-based service from Microsoft that uses a special version of SQL Server as its backend.  SQL Azure helps to ease provisioning and deployment of multiple databases.  Developers do not have to install, setup, patch or manage any softwa...

Data Quality Services (DQS) is a brand new feature in SQL Server 2012.  In short, DQS enables you to build a knowledge base, and use that knowledge base to perform a variety of critical data quality tasks such as correction, enrichment, standardization ...

<p>When designing a data warehouse, how you handle changes to dimensional data over time is the most important decision to make.  It is rare that a dimension will remain static over time.  For example, a customer may change their phone number or t...