This article dives into a fun (and interesting!) strategy for widening fixed-width columns in SQL Server, to reduce downtime, risk, and runtime at the time when a column’s data type needs to be changed.
Passwords are essential and also a problem in many organizations. Guidance has changed over the years and Steve has a few thoughts on what's recommended today.
Our major goal in terms of log maintenance for all databases under our care is to optimize for write performance, in order to support all activities that require SQL Server to write to the log, including data modifications, data loads, index rebuilds, and so on. However, it's also important to keep an eye on possible log fragmentation, which, as described previously, can affect the performance of processes that need to read the log, such as log backups and the crash recovery process.
I recently resolved an issue where a query pulling data from the last 30 days would time out due to the table’s size and the lack of a supporting index. Creating a supporting index is possible, but not ideal; it will be very large and may not be useful for most queries and use cases. I wonder how I could implement a filtered index that follows time and is always limited to the last n days.
Steve found someone using an interesting approach to get developers to address some technical debt.
This article looks at using the FP-Growth algorithm from Python to mine data in SQL Server.
Introduced in SQL Server 2025 CTP 1.3, the PRODUCT() function acts similarly to SUM(), but multiplies values rather than adds them. It is an aggregate function in SQL Server and therefore operates on a data set, rather than on scalar values.
We have some requirements that we meet a particular setting or value, but often we have guidelines and recommendations. Do you know the difference?
This article shows how you can easily create connections in your Power BI workspace that use Identity Authentication to connect to your data.
By Steve Jones
dolorblindness – n. the frustration that you’ll never be able to understand another person’s...
By Steve Jones
I had a customer ask about analyzing their Test Data Manager (TDM) usage to...
By Steve Jones
I had an idea for an animated view of a sales tool, and started...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Optimism Without Illusion or Why...
Hi all, I'm trying to do classic scenario for loading multiple Excel files into...
Hi So the case statement is slowing this down - but for the life...
In SQL Server 2025, what is returned by this code:
SELECT EDIT_DISTANCE('tim', 'tom')
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