SQL Server 2016 offers a new tool for performance tuning called Query Store. This holds metrics that let you quickly see when an execution plan change has negatively impacted the database.

Microsoft has just added support for query hints to Azure SQL Database, giving database administrators a powerful tool to manage the performance of ISV application code. Here's how it works.

The Query Store hints feature is available in Azure SQL Database Managed Instance, and like most database engine features, I would expect it to make its way into SQL Server at some point in the ...

SQL Query Store is a new feature offered in SQL Server 2016 that allows DBAs to see which queries ran when, how often and with what performance results to optimize queries and query plan selection.

However, even without a JSON datatype, SQL Server 2016 still lets you query data stored in JSON format. I’ll look at that support in a later column (among other features, it provides a way to ...