Today I had a need to manually trigger and sustain a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) inside a Windows Server VM. The goal was to be able to trigger a BSOD so that I could work on the detection of powered on but failed VMs inside a server environment. All… Read more

It’s Monday time for this week’s blog and twitter round-up for last week. If you haven’t already, follow me on twitter (@StrateSQL). This is a good chance to catch up on data platform technology and career related information I’ve shared in the last week and activity on this… Read more

You have an on call, you have a business continuity plan, you have a disaster recovery plan but what happens when your developer, DBA or whoever is hit by a bus?

The situation

User: Oh noes! The web sites down!

One quick call later

Developer: Hmm, it looks… Read more

My previous post was focused on controlling read operations. With the latest enhancements to the row-level security, it is now possible to restrict write operations as well. This feature is currently available as a preview now generally available in Azure SQL Database V12. Let’s see how that works.

Filtering and…

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Continuation from the previous 72 parts, the whole series can be found at http://www.nikoport.com/columnstore/.

Since the very first version of SQL Server the maximum size for the Delta-Stores as well as the compressed Row Groups was limited to 1048567 Rows. This number represents the power of 2 in exponent… Read more

There was a time I worked in a company any we lived in the command line. This was in the early 90s, prior to Windows v3.1 being released and we primarily used DOS on a Novell network.

We also had paper phone books on every desk for the 1,000+ people… Read more

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Update new download location is https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/435e7238-0e64-4667-8980-5… Duplicate indexes, one of the most pointless things you can do to a table that just adds pure overhead. No one likes them so SQL Developers do your DBA’s a favour and stop them from ever being deployed :) This new tool for the…

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Update new download location is https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/435e7238-0e64-4667-8980-5… Duplicate indexes, one of the most pointless things you can do to a table that just adds pure overhead. No one likes them so SQL Developers do your DBA’s a favour and stop them from ever being deployed :) This new tool for the…

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Hi friends, in SQL Server 2016 to check the existence of the object a new optional clause IF EXISTS gets …

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I think there were are few sighs of relief around the country yesterday after the chancellor finished giving his autumn financial statement to parliament. For the past few weeks there has been plenty of reports of doom and gloom from the various media channels suggesting that the end was nigh… Read more

I think there were are few sighs of relief around the country yesterday after the chancellor finished giving his autumn financial statement to parliament. For the past few weeks there has been plenty of reports of doom and gloom from the various media channels suggesting that the end was nigh… Read more

Microsoft continues to improve indexes and options for additional performance enhancements. One I see frequently is the need for a covering index. Before we look at those options, let’s talk about the need for a covering index.

The term covering index was created probably a decade ago. The idea is… Read more

Hi friends, in this blog we will learn how we can create the SQL database at Microsoft Azure. Login into …

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The DAX function documentation in MSDN can be found on separate pages,  organized by function categories and then details for every function.  This is useful but you can’t view all of the functions in one searchable page.  If you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, it can be a…

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Update new download location is https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/435e7238-0e64-4667-8980-5… In-line TVF’s are awesome, they are a great way to reuse T-SQL code without the performance penalties of multi line TVF’s or horror of horrors Scalar Functions. Taking select statements and turning them into in-line TVF’s is actually really really simple using the TSql…

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Update new download location is https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/435e7238-0e64-4667-8980-5… In-line TVF’s are awesome, they are a great way to reuse T-SQL code without the performance penalties of multi line TVF’s or horror of horrors Scalar Functions. Taking select statements and turning them into in-line TVF’s is actually really really simple using the TSql…

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