When I’m at the PASS Summit in Seattle this week, I will need to remember that I can’t just step onto the road if I’m walking along the footpath on the right-hand side. In the UK and Australia, where we drive the correct side, it’s fine (just don’t tell my kids), because the cars that are nearest me are coming towards me – except of course, the ...

No really – hear me out. Of course you create tables, and you query tables, and we say that data is stored in tables. The table is (rightly) a fundamental part of relational theory. But I find that when I think about queries and how they run, I need to approach the system thinking about the indexes that I’m querying, not the tables. When you ...

I’m giving a presentation on May 12th at the Adelaide .Net User Group, around the topic of spatial data, and in particular, the visualization of said data. Given that it’s about one the larger types, this post should also count towards Michael Coles’ T-SQL Tuesday on BLOB data. I wrote recently about my experience with exploded data, but what I ...

In SQL Server, the cost of a particular plans is based largely on I/O, which makes this post a good candidate for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Mike Walsh who, like me, walks a straight path. In considering I/O – the movement of data generally In and Out of disk and memory – my thoughts come very much to query cost. If I run set ...