SQL Data Mask is the latest prototype to come out of the Foundry, Redgate’s research and development division. It copies your database while anonymizing personal data, and you can use it to mask your databases right now, free of charge. This blog post from Developer Santiago Arias explains what's new in the latest update.  Read more...

Both options have their advantages and disadvantages. Neither is universally right for all situations. Understand the differences before picking the model that works for your situation.  Read more...

Am I guilty of over-customising software? Read this and let us know what you think.  Read more...

Phil Factor on the perils of trying to squeeze good insights out of bad surveys.  Read more...

Scala and Apache Spark might seem an unlikely medium for implementing an ETL process, but there are reasons for considering it as an alternative. After all, many Big Data solutions are ideally suited to the preparation of data for input into a relational database, and Scala is a well thought-out and expressive language. Krzysztof Stanaszek describes some of the advantages and disadvantages of a scala-based approach to implementing and testing an ETL solution.  Read more...

A new whitepaper published today gives Microsoft SQL customers technical guidance for how to approach GDPR compliance with Microsoft SQL technologies.  Read more...

Redgate are doing some early stage research around PostgreSQL, and would really like to hear about your experiences. If you think you can help, check out their short survey.  Read more...

Who's on first, null edition.  Read more...

An example of exporting and importing table data with JSON in Azure and SQL Server 2016.  Read more...

Some people will assure you that you can't do any serious statistical calculations in SQL. In the first of a series of articles, Phil factor aims to prove them wrong by explaining how easy it is to calculate Pearson's Product Moment Correlation.  Read more...

The Redgate SQL Monitor team has been looking into how you can more effectively monitor SQL Server running on a virtual machine, and are pleased to announce that they've begun this by introducing support for VMware in SQL Monitor version 7.0.11. Find out more about the beta feature in this blog post.  Read more...

In this article, I will provide a set of examples to showcase the use of OUTPUT clause within the MERGE statement and how to capture the OUTPUT clause results into an archive table.  Read more...

SQL Server is becoming more capable all the time, requiring fewer human resources for basic management.  Read more...

Partitioning data is a standard SQL Server administration practice. Partitions enable independent administration of different slices of data. When a SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) tabular data model is developed and processed, data is read from the source system and loaded into the tabular data model configured in In-Memory processing mode. Every time the model is processed, the entire data set may not require re-processing. Only certain slices of data containing changes may require re-processing which can be achieved by partitioning data into logical slices. In this post, Siddharth Mehta looks at how to partition tables in Tabular SSAS.  Read more...

Learn how Microsoft adopted DevOps at scale in this free Redgate webinar on June 12. Donovan Brown, Senior DevOps Program Manager in Microsoft’s US Developer Division, will share how Microsoft embarked on its own DevOps journey reducing a three-year release cycle down to three weeks. Sign up now.  Read more...

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This stairway series was started in 2015. As such, the focus was on SQL Server 2012 and SQL Server 2014 only. When SQL Server 2016 was released, with lots of improvements in the columnstore technology, I decided to finish the planned levels with the original focus on SQL Server 2012 and 2014, and add one extra level with a brief overview of the improvements available in SQL Server 2016.  Read more...

Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) are a significant and valuable addition to the DBA's troubleshooting armory, laying bare previously unavailable information regarding the under-the-covers activity of your database sessions and transactions.  Read more...

When you are doing the rapid deployment of an updated SSIS project, there are a number of things you have to check to make sure that the deployment will be successful. These will include such settings as the values in environment variables, Package parameters and project parameters. The DbFit test framework turns out to be ideal for the purpose of doing final checks as part of a deployment process, as Nat Sundar demonstrates.  Read more...

In this article, I will provide a set of examples to showcase the use of OUTPUT clause in capturing the results of the updated rows into a table variable for the UPDATE statements.   Read more...