Imagine your SQL assistant is a rocket, blasting through complex queries. Then one day you realize you're using rocket fuel to fetch a grocery list. It’s exciting, until the fuel bill arrives.

The optimizer is the heart and soul of a relational DBMS. It analyzes SQL statements and determines the most efficient access plan for satisfying each statement. The optimizer accomplishes this by ...

Optimizing the performance of operational databases and the applications that access them is a constant battle for DBAs. Of course, writing efficient SQL is the most important aspect of ensuring ...

As I discussed in an earlier column, SQL Server keeps a plan cached for each query it sees (assuming the query requires planning in the first place, of course). That's great for speeding up processing ...