A real world story of how someone moved from Enterprise Edition to Standard for not only the SQL Server database engine, but also with SSRS, SSIS, and SSAS.
Tracking metrics and reporting on them to others can help ensure everyone is aware of how your database servers are functioning. However, Steve notes that we have to agree on what we are measuring.
This article documents a SQL injection vulnerability I discovered in sys.sp_dbmmonitorupdate, a Microsoft-signed system stored procedure. For other SQL Server security vulnerabilities I’ve discovered, see the full series here.
In this article, you’ll learn step-by-step setup, Python code implementation, troubleshooting, and best practices to ensure your solution is secure and scalable.
Large databases usually have a negative impact on maintenance time, scalability and query performance. For maintenance, these large single databases have to be backed up daily while the amount of actual changing data might be small. For performance, tables without correct indexes result in full table or clustered index scans. As the data grows the total query time increase linearly. How can we decrease downtime for the maintenance window for large databases and optimize the performance of daily queries?
Steve notes SQL Server 2016 went out of support this past week. What are you plans if you run this version?
Learn about implicit conversions, which can dramatically affect the performance of your workload.
Preparing for disaster is important, both at work and in your personal life.
Learn how to use VECTOR_DISTANCE and VECTOR_SEARCH in SQL Server to find semantically similar data.
By James Serra
Originally published April 2022; substantially updated July 2026. This post is a complete replacement...
The idea behind Azure SQL Developer is for anyone to build, iterate, and test...
By Steve Jones
I’m sure many of you are using AI regularly, perhaps chatting, perhaps using some...
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If I use the -k parameter with a number after it, what does this change in SQL Server?
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