Guarding Against SQL Injection at the Database Layer (SQL Server)
This article presents a way to check and validate input before using it in your dynamic SQL queries to prevent SQL Injection problems.
2026-03-02
4,758 reads
Articles
Python is good, but not perfect – here are 10 reasons to avoid it
Four years ago I wrote a blog on this site explaining why Python is better than C# and, arguably, most other programming languages. To redress the balance, here are 10 reasons why you might want to avoid getting caught up in Python’s oh-so-tempting coils – particularly when building large, long-lived systems.
2026-03-02
Designing SQL Server Pipelines That Are Ready for AI Before You Actually Need AI
Introduction. Why AI Readiness Starts in the Database You probably don’t need machine learning today. Most organizations don’t. You already have reporting dashboards, operational workflows, and business intelligence that work just fine without neural networks or predictive models. That’s not a failure. It’s normal. The problem doesn’t show up immediately. It shows up a few […]
2026-02-27
2,454 reads
SSMS 22 Offline Installation
Beginning with SQL Server Management Studio 21, Microsoft stopped providing the direct download package/binaries to install SSMS, instead it just downloads the SSMS installer. This installer then starts the installation of SSMS and downloads what is needed to install SSMS. Sometimes there may be a need to do an offline installation where you do not have access to the internet. In this article, we walk through the steps to do an offline install of SSMS.
2026-02-27
Remotely Engineer Fabric Lakehouse objects: The Fabric Modern Data Platform
In this next installments of the Modern Fabric Data Warehouse, we look at tools for developers.
2026-02-25
2,368 reads
SQL Server 2025 CREATE EXTERNAL MODEL and AI_GENERATE_EMBEDDINGS Commands Explained
Now that SQL Server 2025 has finally been released to the public, I was finally able to test and learn a lot about this command (named CREATE EXTERNAL MODEL), and I want to share my knowledge with you here. If you’re new to the world of AI, don’t worry, we’ll start with the basics and evolve to where this command fits in!
2026-02-25
Downtime Caused by the Postgres Transaction ID Wraparound Problem
Learn about transaction ID wraparound in PostgreSQL, which caused a problem for the author.
2026-02-23 (first published: 2026-02-13)
5,128 reads
Real-time On-prem SQL Server Data in Excel – Over the Internet
Learn how you can combine Power BI and Excel to share data from your local SQL Server across the Internet to Excel on a client machine.
2026-02-23
3,144 reads
Microsoft Fabric and MQTT for Real-Time IoT Data Ingestion and Analytics
Microsoft Fabric is a unified platform for data integration, data engineering, real-time intelligence, and advanced analytics. Fabric is known for providing an integrated way of working with your data, connecting to many diverse types of sources and across the data landscape. How do we get started ingesting and analyzing real-time data streamed over the MQTT protocol?
2026-02-23
25 Years Later: What SQLServerCentral Meant to Me
A look back at SQL Server Central after 25 years from founder Brian Knight.
2026-02-20
1,504 reads
Blogs
T-SQL Tuesday #202 SQL Server Outage You’ll Never Forget: A Roundup
When I put together the invitation for T-SQL Tuesday #202, I wasn't sure what...
A Last Minute Trip to the EU
By Steve Jones
My life has some crazy travel stretches for sure. Between speaking, office visits, customer...
Part 3 of 3: Tuning DiskANN — R, Alpha, L, Beam Width, Recall and Latency
In Part 1, we saw how ‘Vamana’ represents vectors as nodes, connects them with...
Forums
Server-Level Table sizes
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Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in SQL Server 2025: Fixing the Kitchen-Sink Search Procedure
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in...
Question of the Day
ORDER BY alias
There is a table tmp_tab:
CREATE TABLE tmp_tab ( id int, val int );
INSERT INTO tmp_tab VALUES (1, 1), (2, NULL), (3, 3), (4, 4), (5, 5);You want to order the rows ids by the following expression:
ISNULL(val, id) + 1Which of the following queries produces the expected ordering and why? (Select all correct) See possible answers