This editorial was originally published on May 18, 2019. It is being re-run as Steve is on holiday. Back in my days as a SQL server DBA, I didn't have many third-party tools at my disposal. I remember having a monitoring tool with licenses for only three or four SQL server instances. Whenever there was […]
2025-01-20 (first published: 2019-05-18)
358 reads
During my technical career, I’ve changed companies several times. I even worked as an independent contractor for three years. One thing I have never done before was switch departments and roles within one company. That’s about to change in a couple of weeks as I move from Simple Talk Editor and DevOps Advocate in Marketing […]
2022-05-21
96 reads
You’ve probably heard that SQL Server 2022 is on the way, and, assuming the name doesn’t change, it will be later this year. That is great news for folks in the data platform community as features and improvements they’ve been hoping for are added. I’m not currently supporting any production SQL Servers, but I’m still […]
2022-04-30
117 reads
Some organizations have policies in place to make sure that everything in their IT infrastructure is documented. There are runbooks, procedures, wikis, diagrams, charts, code comments, and more to make sure that knowledge is available if an employee leaves or when disaster strikes. Not only does the documentation exist, but it’s also organized and easy […]
2022-04-09
202 reads
Last week I attended my first in-person event in over two years. SQLBits, the largest data platform conference in Europe, was a hybrid event and marked the first time many of us met in person in ages. It was a huge success as folks from around the world gathered to learn...and celebrate! I heard several […]
2022-03-19
95 reads
Becoming overly enthusiastic about a new SQL Server feature can backfire if you don’t do some testing. One example is the table variable introduced with SQL Server 2000. At the time, there was a myth that table variables would always perform better than temp tables with the reasoning that, by definition, variables are stored in […]
2022-02-26
337 reads
I haven’t done it much the past few years, but I would answer some programming questions posted in forums back in the day. In the late 90s, I answered Visual Basic questions and eventually switched to SQL Server questions here on SQL Server Central as my career progressed. Answering questions not only assisted someone else, […]
2022-02-05
110 reads
Some of the most problematic T-SQL code I’ve seen over the years originated because the developer approached T-SQL with techniques more suitable for developing applications. I often saw these issues in my consulting days and always took the opportunity to teach the customer instead of only fixing the problems. One reason is that SQL is […]
2022-01-15
207 reads
I’ve been teaching T-SQL to groups of students since 2014 at the non-profit LaunchCode in St. Louis. LaunchCode provides free tech training, paid apprenticeships, and career support to hundreds of people who have the ability and interest but not always the opportunity to land tech careers. For example, not having a college degree can eliminate […]
2021-12-31
395 reads
Back in the late 90s, I had one large book on my desk with everything I needed – or thought I needed -- to know about SQL Server. It covered T-SQL, installation, backups, security, and more. Over the years, Microsoft has added components like SQL Server Integration Services and features like windowing functions and improved […]
2021-12-11
369 reads
By Steve Jones
I heard someone say recently that you can’t change a primary key value in...
By Kevin3NF
Indexes 101: What, Why, and When? “What Is an Index?” I get this question...
By Arun Sirpal
I do believe most people know about the ability to backup your SQL server...
I need to update greatherthan8 (category) record to Missing (status) if the same member...
Quick one I hope in case I'm heading off in entirely the wrong direction!...
Hi everyone I am looking at the size of my db on disk (ie...
How can I check what value I used for TEXTSIZE? I ran this code:
SET TEXTSIZE 8096But then deleted the code and couldn't remember. Is there a way to check this? See possible answers