It's Time to Break Up with Archive Tables Aaron Bertrand talks about archive tables in SQL Server and how to improve the process using table partitioning. Aaron Bertrand ◆ July 27, 2026 1
Bad Habits: Avoiding NULL in SQL Server Aaron Bertrand talks about NULLs, the logical issues with avoiding them, and potential performance impacts. Aaron Bertrand ◆ October 21, 2021 2
New Metadata-Only Column Changes in SQL Server 2016 Paul White investigates the new metadata-only column data type changes possible in SQL Server 2016 when using data compression. Paul White ◆ April 17, 2020 3
Minimizing impact of widening an IDENTITY column – part 4 Aaron Bertrand (@AaronBertrand) continues his series on widening an IDENTITY column, showing how he would attack the problem directly. Aaron Bertrand ◆ August 4, 2016 3
Minimizing impact of widening an IDENTITY column – part 3 Aaron Bertrand (@AaronBertrand) continues his series on upsizing an IDENTITY column from INT to BIGINT – this time focusing on workarounds. Aaron Bertrand ◆ February 17, 2016 6
Minimizing impact of widening an IDENTITY column – part 2 Aaron Bertrand (@AaronBertrand) continues his series on upsizing an IDENTITY column from int to bigint, detailing several challenging obstacles. Aaron Bertrand ◆ February 11, 2016 2
Minimizing impact of widening an IDENTITY column – part 1 As part of a new series, Aaron Bertrand takes a look at what happens to the structure of a page when an INT column needs to be upsized to a BIGINT. Aaron Bertrand ◆ January 29, 2016 3
Can ColumnStore Help Pagination Workloads? Aaron Bertrand (@AaronBertrand) revisits an older post about SQL Server pagination to see if any implementation of ColumnStore indexes can improve performance. Aaron Bertrand ◆ January 15, 2016 1
Bad habits : Focusing only on disk space when choosing keys SQL Sentry's Aaron Bertrand (@AaronBertrand) examines various impacts on SQL Server – not just disk space – when choosing a GUID as a clustering key. Aaron Bertrand ◆ January 6, 2015 7
What Virtual Filestats Do, and Do Not, Tell You About I/O Latency Erin Stellato (@erinstellato) of SQLskills.com shows us why I/O latency or high I/O-related waits are not always indicative of slow storage. Erin Stellato ◆ October 23, 2013 11
Generate random integers without collisions Aaron Bertrand (@AaronBertrand) discusses a common requirement, generating random numbers to serve as surrogate keys, and shows how you can avoid the incremental cost of preventing collisions. Aaron Bertrand ◆ September 26, 2013 3
