Monica Rathbun

Monica lives in Virginia and is a Microsoft MVP for Data Platform. She has over 15 years of experience working with a wide variety of database platforms with a focus on SQL Server. She is a frequent speaker at IT industry conferences on topics including performance tuning and configuration management. She is the Leader of the Hampton Roads SQL Server User Group and a Mid-Atlantic PASS Regional Mentor. She is passionate about SQL Server and the SQL Server community, doing anything she can to give back. Monica can always be found on Twitter (@sqlespresso) handing out helpful tips.

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Blog Post

The FAST number_rows Query Hint

Query hints are always about tradeoffs—typically you are giving up something, such as flexibility, to achieve more consistency, or very specific performance characteristic. One example of this migt when...

2019-10-29 (first published: )

1,013 reads

Blog Post

New Event Calendar

Speaking Engagements Check out my new Event Calendar, to see my upcoming and past speaking engagements. You can catch me at various events throughout the year. If you are...

2019-10-15

11 reads

Blog Post

Quick SSMS Tip

It is widely known that I am a horrible speller and hate to type code. I tend to use a lot of code snippets and reuse code to avoid...

2019-09-20 (first published: )

1,261 reads

Blog Post

Are My SQL Server Indexes Being Used?

Indexes can be incredibly beneficial to your database performance; however, they do come with a cost—indexes both consume storage space and affect insert performance. Therefore, it is important as...

2019-09-11 (first published: )

2,788 reads

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Blogs

AI: Blog a Day – Day 4: Transformers – Encoder, Decoder, and Attention

By

Continuing from Day 3 where we covered LLM models open/closed and their parameters, Today...

Flyway Tips: Multiple Projects

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One of the nice things about Flyway Desktop is that it helps you manage...

What DevOps Look Like in Microsoft Fabric

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Microsoft Fabric (not to be confused with the more general term “fabric” in DevOps)...

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Forums

Can an Azure App Service Managed Identity be used for SQL Login?

By jasona.work

I'm fairly certain I know the answer to this from digging into it yesterday,...

Azure Synapse database refresh

By Sreevathsa Mandli

Hi Team, I am trying to refresh the Azure Synapse Dedicated pool from production...

how to write this query?

By water490

hi everyone I am not sure how to write the query that will produce...

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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;

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