Database Security, People and Processes
Protecting data is not easy, but it is critical. In this article, David Poole discusses database security and the behaviors needed to build secure systems.
2020-01-22
Articles
Removing the Square Bracket Decorations with SQL Prompt
If you avoid illegal characters and reserved words in your identifiers, you'll rarely need delimiters. Sadly, SSMS applies square bracket delimiters indiscriminately, as a precaution, when generating build scripts. Phil Factor provides a handy function that adds quoted delimiters only where they are really needed and then sits back and lets SQL Prompt strip out any extraneous square brackets, in a flash.
2020-01-22
Move Data from SQL Server to Azure Blob Storage with Incremental Changes – Part 2
In part 2 of this article, learn how you can move incremental changes in a SQL Server table using Azure Data Factory.
2020-01-21
2,642 reads
New release: SQL Change Automation 4.1
We’ve heard from users that they really care about static data and were missing the feature in the SQL Change Automation SSMS plugin. In v4.1, we’ve added support for the tracking of static data tables to the SSMS extension, alongside existing support in the VS extension. Maya Malakova has written a technical summary showing how to use this feature. Learn more about the release here.
2020-01-21
Types of SQL Server Indexes
In this tip we will go through each type of index that is available in SQL Server and give an overview as well as advice on which index types fit each particular use case.
2020-01-21
SSAS Error: Duplicate attribute key found when processing
Learn how to resolve a duplicate value error when processing dimensions in SSAS.
2020-01-20
23,316 reads
Using Aliases in SQL Prompt
Phil Factor explores the role of table aliases, explaining when they are required, and their general purpose otherwise, the need for sensible naming of aliases, and how SQL Prompt handles them.
2020-01-20
Using Calendars and Dates in Power BI
You can use a host of time-intelligence functions in DAX to calculate everything from simple year-to-date totals to moving averages and average opening and closing balances. In this article, Andy Brown shows how to model various scenarios with calendars and dates, and how to get around some of the issues you may encounter.
2020-01-20
SSRS Audit: All reports executed/not-executed during previous 30 days
This article presents a pair of queries and reports that reads the ReportServer.dbo.ExecutionLog table to list all SSRS reports that were executed or not-executed in the past 30 days, how many times they were executed, and who executed them.
2020-01-17 (first published: 2017-04-25)
11,277 reads
A simple use case for Columnstore Indexes in SQL Server
In this article we look at different use cases for columnstore indexes like when performing SQL Server count * queries.
2020-01-17
Blogs
Rolling Back a Broken Release
By Steve Jones
We had an interesting discussion about deployments in databases and how you go forward...
A bespoke reporting solution doesn’t have to cost the earth
By ChrisJenkins
You could be tolerating limited reporting because there isn’t an off the shelf solution...
Presenting with Visual Studio Code
A while back I wrote a quick post on setting up key mappings in...
Forums
Cross-DB Ownership Chaining problem
We want to setup a gateway db to host stored procedures which use tables...
Lots of FKs
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Lots of FKs
Real-time On-prem SQL Server Data in Excel – Over the Internet
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Real-time On-prem SQL Server Data...
Question of the Day
Lots of FKs
In SQL Server 2025, what are the most outgoing and incoming FK references a table can have?
See possible answers