SQL Server pricing depends on edition + licensing model. There is no single flat price. Per-Core Licensing This is the most common model for production deployments. You license each physical or virtual core that SQL Server can use. There is a minimum core requirement per server. General 2025 pricing ranges (approximate): • Standard Edition: Lower […]
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A Practical Guide from Basics to Advanced Usage Introduction SQL Server 2025 represents a meaningful step forward for Microsoft’s data platform. While it continues the core strengths that DBAs and developers rely on such as stability, performance, and deep tooling, SQL Server 2025 also leans harder into modern data workloads. This includes improved query intelligence,
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Security has always been a core strength of SQL Server, but SQL Server 2025 takes a meaningful step forward by aligning the database engine with modern identity, zero trust principles, and cloud-first security expectations. Instead of bolting security on after the fact, SQL Server 2025 moves authentication, authorization, and access control closer to how organizations
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Introduction One of the more concerning messages you may see in the SQL Server error log is: Long Sync IO: Scheduler <n> had <x> Sync IOs in nonpreemptive mode longer than 1000 ms This message often appears alongside blocking, slow performance, or application timeouts. It commonly raises the question: is this a storage issue or
Introduction SQL Server 2025 marks one of the biggest shifts in the SQL Server ecosystem since the 2016 release. We finally get native JSON storage, full RegEx support, BASE64 functions, PRODUCT aggregates, JSON indexes, and the long-awaited external REST endpoint invocation. The goal of this series is to walk through every major new engine feature
Building a Standard, Least-Privilege Security Model That Scales Introduction SQL Server security is one of those topics everyone agrees is important, yet many environments still rely on inherited permissions, shared logins, or rushed decisions made during go-live. Over time, those shortcuts quietly turn into risk. Excessive permissions, unclear ownership, and weak authentication practices make it
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A Complete Playbook for Modern DBAs SQL Server health checks are one of the few things that never go away in a DBA’s career. It does not matter if you inherit a system, support a system that has been running for years, or walk into a new environment where the last DBA left suddenly. Someone
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SQL Server 2025 (17.x) is the first release in a long time that feels like more than “2022 with patches.” It is aimed at AI-heavy, hybrid, and event driven workloads while still giving DBAs and developers practical wins around JSON, performance, security, and HA. At the time of writing, SQL Server 2025 is still in
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Introduction Indexes are critical to SQL Server performance. A well-designed index can make a query fly. A bad or redundant one can quietly drag down performance and waste space. One common culprit is overlapping indexes—multiple indexes that are nearly identical and cover the same workload. This often happens when teams add “just one more index”
🧭 Understanding and Cleaning Up Overlapping Indexes in SQL Server Read More »
Introduction For years, performance tuning in SQL Server has meant digging through execution plans, adding indexes, or rewriting queries to coax the optimizer into better behavior. With SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) v22 Preview 3, Microsoft is introducing something new: the Query Hint Recommendation Tool. This feature lets you quickly experiment with optimizer hints, compare
SSMS v22 Query Hint Recommendation Tool: A New Era of Query Optimization Read More »
