Virtualization and consolidation of SQL Servers during a complex database system upgrade
31 Jul 2017

One of the largest US national energy suppliers wanted to upgrade their SQL Server system and deploy it on VMware. As a consulting partner, we offered a new architecture for their virtualized system. In addition, we found some server consolidation opportunities which would improve the overall system’s performance. As a result, we helped our customers deploy the newly created system in production. Moreover, we delivered a comprehensive list of best practices for evident and accessible management of their environment. Learn more […]

SQL Server 2017 Workshops and the SQL Pass Summit
28 Jul 2017

I’ve been heads-down updating Microsoft’s Hands-on Labs, originally written for SQL Server 2016 CTP3, into something that showcases not only the SP1 release of SQL Server 2016, but also some of the new SQL Server 2017 features. One of the most exciting new features is Adaptive Query Processing, not to be confused with another awesome new feature called Automatic Query Tuning! So I will not be able to continue my blog series on Clustered Indexes this week. (Don’t worry, it’s […]

Database Compare Suite update 4.10 brings Sybase IQ support
26 Jul 2017

We are happy to announce the latest release of DB Best’s in-house tool Database Compare Suite. The new version marked 4.10 brings support for yet another data warehouse platform — Sybase IQ. Watch Database Compare Suite in action in the following video and learn more about other improvements of the latest update from our blog post.

Finding My Pages
18 Jul 2017

In a post from two weeks ago, I told you that this week I would show you how to look inside pages to see the NEXTPAGE and PREVPAGE pointers. When I started to write this, I realized that before I can show you how to look inside the pages, I need to show you how to find out what pages to look at. So I’m going to juggle this blog schedule a bit, and this week I’ll show you how […]

Increase database performance while migrating to SQL Server
Increasing database performance by migrating from Ingres to SQL Server
18 Jul 2017

One of our customers needed to migrate their Ingres Database system to Microsoft SQL Server wanting to improve the performance of their system. We came up with a migration solution and updated the business logic module of their application. As a result, the customer achieved a sufficient performance increase, improved the database system security, and got an optimized business logic architecture. The video below depicts the migration process in details:

Architecting highly available and scalable system when migrating to SQL Server
Architecting highly available and scalable system when migrating to SQL Server on AWS
12 Jul 2017

Our customer needed to reduce the licensing costs of their Oracle database. We came up with a comprehensive solution by migrating their database to SQL Server platform. We also remediated all affected application components. As a result, our customer benefited from obtaining higher value SQL Server platform with enhanced scalability and high availability approaches.

What Makes an Index Clustered?
10 Jul 2017

In my previous post, I told you about what it meant for an index in SQL Server to be ‘clustered’. Usually, when we talk about SQL Server indexes, we are talking about indexes organized as B-trees (or technically, B+-trees, but we won’t go into the difference here.) For these indexes there are two basic properties that set clustered indexes apart from nonclustered. First, the index leaf level IS the data. It is not a copy of the data or pointers […]

Enhancing SQL Server database performance by 3x acceleration of queries execution
Enhancing SQL Server database performance by 3x acceleration of queries execution
06 Jul 2017

A leading provider of business management solutions currently hosts many of their workloads using SQL Server databases on Azure. They faced a number of SQL Server database performance issues and needed an efficient solution to resolve them. Having analyzed the customer’s system, we delivered instructions with detailed descriptions of all discovered issues and approaches to fix them. With our instructions, our customer achieved more than three times better overall query performance.

Is Your Index Clustered Enough?
30 Jun 2017

When you tell SQL Server to create a regular clustered index on a table, it will completely rebuild your table. SQL Server will take your data rows and rearrange them on new pages. Your table’s pages become the leaf level of the clustered index, so sometimes we call the table a clustered table. People usually think of clustered as meaning ‘sorted’, and for the most part I’ll go along with this. But sorting can be logical or physical, and there […]

Leveraging Amazon Web Services to build a set of video streaming applications
30 Jun 2017

One of our regular customers wanted to add video streaming functions to their existing web and mobile applications. As the developers of their original applications, we proposed to re-architect the application and move it to the Amazon cloud. The customer agreed, and we delivered a cost-effective solution for in-house video streaming, based on Amazon Web Services. Watch the following video to learn more about our technical approach to the upgrade and development of this application.