Advent of Code
If you want your skills to be sharp, you practice. If you want to get yourself to actually do practice, you call it a “challenge”. This is what the...
2015-12-23
10 reads
Simple SQL Server
Use Compression to Combine Data Quality and Performance
We’ve been using the wrong data types for all the wrong reasons. DBAs, developers, data architects, etc. have all been...
2015-12-21
985 reads
Indexing Strategy
What do I care about when I’m playing with indexes? That’s easy. I want as few indexes as possible efficiently referenced...
2015-12-28 (first published: 2015-12-16)
3,528 reads
Picking a Clustered Index
A Clustered Index is not another term for Primary Key, and more thought should be put into the key columns...
2015-12-16 (first published: 2015-12-14)
2,532 reads
Data Compression
Data compression is often misunderstood to cost CPU in exchange for smaller size on disk. Somewhat true, but that simple...
2015-12-08
1,131 reads
Querying the Plan Cache
I love working with indexes, and I need to know what’s using them to work on them intelligently. Most of...
2015-12-08 (first published: 2015-12-01)
2,013 reads
SQL Server Error Log Reader
Reading the SQL Server Error Log is miserable. It contains very useful information you should address as soon as possible,...
2015-11-16
688 reads
Give More Feedback
I write on my blog and get a couple comments at best. I talk at conferences and a large part of...
2015-11-06 (first published: 2015-11-02)
646 reads
Extended Events Intro
Extended Events is supposed to be taking over for most of Profiler and server-side tracing functionality, but there were people...
2015-10-26
1,525 reads
Technical Interviews – How to Thrive
There’s a trick to technical interviews. Every question is looking for integrity first, and intelligence and energy second. This is...
2014-05-23 (first published: 2014-05-13)
2,774 reads
Blogs
Identity Columns Can’t Be Updated: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
I’m not sure I knew identity column values could not be updated. I ran...
Rolling Back a Broken Release
By Steve Jones
We had an interesting discussion about deployments in databases and how you go forward...
A bespoke reporting solution doesn’t have to cost the earth
By ChrisJenkins
You could be tolerating limited reporting because there isn’t an off the shelf solution...
Forums
Can someone please explain what happens?
I have mentioned this several times over several years. Can someone please help me...
SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT) returns null when nothing is found instead of 0
SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT Component) AS Found FROM tblComponents WHERE(Component NOT LIKE '%[a-z]%') AND(LTRIM(RTRIM(Component)) = 'GM13622')...
Remotely Engineer Fabric Lakehouse objects: The Fabric Modern Data Platform
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Remotely Engineer Fabric Lakehouse objects:...
Question of the Day
Creating JSON III
In a SQL Server 2025 table, called Beer, I have this data:
BeerIDBeerName 1Becks 2Fat Tire 3Mac n Jacks 4Alaskan Amber 8KirinI run this code:
SELECT JSON_OBJECTAGG(
BeerID: BeerName )
FROM beer;
What are the results? See possible answers