Deleting a Column: Meta-data-only operation

Microsoft’s SQL Server development team is constantly working to improve performance. One important performance optimization methodology that has been eminent in SQL Server for a long time has been making as many meta-data-only operations as…

Recompress Heaps

Heaps, or tables without a clustered index, suffer from a little-known problem when configured with page compression. Page compression only takes place once a page is 100% full, i.e. when no more rows can be…

PARSE vs CAST and CONVERT

T-SQL often provides multiple ways to “skin a cat”1 as they say. In this post, we’ll take a look at two “interesting” ways to convert dates and times from character-based columns into a column using…