Category: SQL Server

What are Graph Tables? Amy J, a student in Learning Tree’s course 8463, Querying Microsoft SQL Server 2014 asks “I see SQL Server 2017 has a “graph database” feature. How does a graph differ from the old HierarchyID datatype?”. Good question, Amy. While the old hierarchyID datatype can represesnt, in a very simplistic way, an […]

Perhaps the title should be the disadvantages of sending SQL batches from client applications. Many people think that the primary advantage to stored procedures arises from the fact that they are optimized and compile once and then remain in memory, hopefully to be used again and again. While this can be an advantage, there are […]

Microsoft asserts that SQL Server is the first database with “built-in” artificial intelligence. Of course, no phrase suffers more definitions than “artificial intelligence”, so rather than quibble about AI, we’ll just take a look at the technologies that support Microsoft’s claim. Moving Machine Learning to the Server-Side Great excitement followed the introduction of the integration […]

R Server is dead! Long live Machine Learning Server! The introduction of Microsoft R Server with SQL Server 2016 was tremendously exciting for data scientists and analysts working with “Big Data”. When SQL Server 2017 was released, many were shocked to see that R Server was gone. They were, however, relieved to discover that R […]

Like supporting actors and actresses who never enjoy the spotlight, data types in SQL Server play critical roles and yet rarely receive attention. In fact, selecting the best data types for columns is one of the most important decisions during SQL Server table design. For that reason, let’s take a few moments to review some […]