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Author: Aaron Bertrand

Aaron is a Staff Database Reliability Engineer at Stack Overflow. We don't want to say he's old, but his experience dates back to a time when SQL Server 6.5 was considered "modern." He writes here at sqlperformance.com, over at sqlblog.org, and at MSSQLTips.
Potential enhancements to ASPState

Many people have implemented ASPState in their environment. Some people use the in-memory option (InProc), but usually I see the database option being used. There are some potential inefficiencies here that you might not notice on low volume sites but that will start to affect performance as your web volume ramps up.

  ◆  January 11, 2013
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Database smarter with deeper insights for Microsoft SQL
SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1 & Cumulative Update 1

Recently, Microsoft pushed out Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2012, and they quickly followed up with Cumulative Update 1 for Service Pack 1. The reason for this is that the service pack – due to longer development and regression testing cycles – did not contain any of the fixes from RTM Cumulative Updates 3 & 4. Since many people have waited – based on mostly speculative bias at this point – to even start testing SQL Server 2012 until Service Pack 1 was released, I thought it might be useful to cover a couple of the scenarios you might come across.

  ◆  December 12, 2012
6
Checking if a non-LOB column needs to be updated

Occasionally I see people try to "optimize" their update statements to avoid writing the same value to a particular column. My understanding has always been that if you're going to update a row, assuming all of the values are in-row, the costs of locking the row are much higher than the incremental cost of updating one, two or all columns in that row.

  ◆  October 3, 2012
4
Hit-Highlighting in Full-Text Search

Hit-highlighting is a feature that many people wish SQL Server's Full-Text Search would support natively. This is where you can return the entire document (or an excerpt) and point out the words or phrases that helped match that document to the search. Doing so in an efficient and accurate manner is no easy task, as I found out first hand.

  ◆  September 24, 2012
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