Why Don't You Upgrade in Place?
Is there a reason to upgrade your SQL Server in place instead of building a new instance? Andy Warren has a few thoughts today on why this might be the right choice.
2023-12-20
5,556 reads
Andy Warren
Restore With Standby; A Review and A Lesson Learned
A lesson learned when trying to restore backups with standby. You can't upgrade versions.
2023-09-25
9,384 reads
Monitoring the Number of Connections
Monitoring your SQL Server is important. This article examines one of the metrics you might want to keep an eye on.
2021-02-26 (first published: 2019-02-26)
46,717 reads
A Pattern Based Approach to Masking Errors
A few years ago I had a requirement to allow both developers and customers to see rows from a table used to store error information while making sure that any PII, PCI or similar sensitive data was not displayed. The tolerance for “oops” was low! This article presents one way to solve the challenge by […]
2020-04-27
1,764 reads
Worst Practices - Objects Not Owned by DBO
Last week Andy launched a new series about Worst Practices by talking about why the Hungarian naming convention is bad for column names. This week he's at it again, declaring that the practice of having objects owned by anyone other than dbo is BAD! Agree or disagree, we think you'll enjoy reading this article and adding your thoughts to the discussion!
2019-08-01 (first published: 2002-09-12)
38,423 reads
Worst Practices - Part 1 of a Very Long Series!
Andy starts a new series about Worst Practices - come find out why and read about the first one on his list - using Hungarian Notation for column names!
2019-08-01 (first published: 2001-10-09)
34,394 reads
Error Logging Gone Wild
Many of have applications that log errors to a table. Ever thought about what happens when an application starts to throw a lot of errors? This article looks at the problem and some of the responses you might consider having ready in case it happens to you!
2016-10-11
1,807 reads
If SQL Server Runs on Linux, What's Left for April Fools Day
It’s still a bit hard to believe that SQL Server will soon run on Linux. If you think back to the early days of SQL 7, 2000, even 2005, who would have bet any money on it ever happening?
2016-04-01
2,222 reads
Time to Rebrand
I became a SQL guy back in 1998 because the company that hired me used SQL Server. It’s been a good ride and it’s paid the bills, but after 15 years or so it’s time to do something different.
2015-04-01
6,297 reads
Solid State Tapes–Prelaunch News!
In the world of data it’s always been about speed. SSD’s have become very common on consumer machines and not unusual in corporate datacenters.
2014-03-31
3,135 reads
Blogs
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Microsoft Fabric (not to be confused with the more general term “fabric” in DevOps)...
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Continuing from Day 2 , we learned introduction on Generative AI and Agentic AI,...
Forums
Can an Azure App Service Managed Identity be used for SQL Login?
I'm fairly certain I know the answer to this from digging into it yesterday,...
Azure Synapse database refresh
Hi Team, I am trying to refresh the Azure Synapse Dedicated pool from production...
how to write this query?
hi everyone I am not sure how to write the query that will produce...
Question of the Day
Fun with JSON I
I have some data in a table:
CREATE TABLE #test_data
(
id INT PRIMARY KEY,
name VARCHAR(100),
birth_date DATE
);
-- Step 2: Insert rows
INSERT INTO #test_data
VALUES
(1, 'Olivia', '2025-01-05'),
(2, 'Emma', '2025-03-02'),
(3, 'Liam', '2025-11-15'),
(4, 'Noah', '2025-12-22');
If I run this query, how many rows are returned?
SELECT *
FROM OPENJSON(
(
SELECT t.* FROM #test_data AS t FOR JSON PATH
)
) t; See possible answers