Let's break down when it's ideal to use the NOLOCK hint and when you should never use it. As a consultant, I work on wide swaths of database systems, which means I get to see many, many SQL statements ...

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 ...

Everyone wants faster database queries, and both SQL developers and DBAs can turn to many time-tested methods to achieve that goal. Unfortunately, no single method is foolproof or ironclad. But even ...

First introduced in SQL Server 2012, columnstore indexes can give you major performance gains -- provided you have the right workloads. Here's how columnstore indexes work and what types of data work ...

Ask ChatGPT basic questions about SQL, such as “What is SQL?” or “What are the key components of SQL?” to get a foundational understanding of its purpose and structure. Gain insights into data types, ...

The W3C grants Recommendation status to XQuery, the XML query language designed to do for Web services what SQL did for relational databases. On Jan. 23, 2007 the W3C granted Recommendation status to ...