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

Blogs

Announcements from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference — Barcelona 2026

By

Microsoft shared a broad set of Fabric, Power BI, and SQL updates at FabCon...

Au Revoir for now

By

No, I’m not quitting or retiring. Just going on vacation, but I leave tonight...

Goodbye, Microsoft

By

A few years ago I took a new job at Microsoft, working as a...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

Let's Talk Certifications

By Grant Fritchey

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Let's Talk Certifications, which is...

Force join by longest possible choice

By pdanes

Title pretty much says it. I want to join to a table that has...

Building a SQL Server Fleet Audit That Leadership Actually Reads

By Mayank Sethi

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Building a SQL Server Fleet...

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

RegEx Functions IV

I have this data in a table in a SQL Server 2025 database: 

EmailAddressID EmailAddress
7              dylan0@ADVENTURE-WORKS.COM
8              Diane1@ADVENTURE-WORKS.COM
If I run this query, which row(s) are returned? 
SELECT top 10
 *
 FROM person.EmailAddress
 WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(EmailAddress, '^D', 'i')
 AND BusinessEntityID IN (7,8)

See possible answers