Articles

External Article

SQL Prompt Safety Net Features for SSMS: SQL History

Mistakes occasionally happen. Occasionally, you make some ill-judged 'refinements' to working code and now just wish you could rewind your tab back in time an hour and forget the whole sorry episode. Now and again, SSMS just conspires against you and crashes unexpectedly, and you lose all your currently open query tabs, some of which you hadn't saved. SQL History offers a useful safety net in the event of any of these unfortunate events.

2023-04-17

External Article

Use DDL Triggers to Automatically Keep SQL Server Views in Sync

As much as we tell people to use SCHEMABINDING and avoid SELECT *, there is still a wide range of reasons people do not. A well-documented problem with SELECT * in views, specifically, is that the system caches the metadata about the view from the time the view was created, not when the view is queried. If the underlying table later changes, the view doesn't reflect the updated schema without refreshing, altering, or recreating the view. Wouldn't it be great if you could stop worrying about that scenario and have the system automatically keep the metadata in sync?

2023-04-17

External Article

Three Use Case Examples for SQL Subqueries

There are many great tutorials on syntax, performance, and keywords for invoking subqueries. However, I wish to discover a tip highlighting selected SQL subquery use cases. Please briefly describe three SQL subquery use case examples. For each use case, cover how a subquery interacts with outer queries and the T-SQL for implementing the use case. Review excerpts from each example to show the value of implementing the use case.

2023-04-14

External Article

How to ask for programming help

Over the past 25 years, I have answered a lot of programming questions in online forums, from co-workers, and from friends. It has been a while since I had been around forums, but I recently decided it was time to get back to what started me in the SQL community: answering questions. Not only is it complementary to my current job as Simple-Talk editor, it is really a great joy to be able to help other people with their problems. It is also educational to see the kinds of things other people are going through before you also go through them.

2023-04-12

External Article

Enhancing SSIS ETL Tools with SolarWinds Task Factory

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) has been the de facto ETL tool for over 15 years for DBAs, Developers and Business Intelligence Professionals to extract, transform and load data (i.e. ETL tasks) for specific business processes, data-centric applications, data warehousing, reporting and data exchange between organizations. SSIS is a great product with high adoption across the globe, but has some limitations related to modern data sources, performance and streamlining tedious tasks. How can we overcome these limitations and have SSIS provide greater value?

2023-04-10

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Backing Up a DMK

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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The Quiet Part

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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BIT_COUNT in SQL Server

By john.martin

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Question of the Day

Backing Up a DMK

In SQL Server 2025, I have a database with a Database Masker Key (DMK). I want to back up this key and keep a copy offline. When do I have to open this key before running the backup?

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