Articles

External Article

How to Script Dimensions with data build tool (dbt) Macros

In this article, we’ll revisit the dimension models we created. We wrote the entire SQL statement for the dimension by hand, and the dimensions themselves were very rudimentary; they lacked a surrogate key and there were no audit columns (such as insert date and update date). We’ll show you how we can expand the dimensions using Jinja, but also how we can minimize development effort by baking reusable patterns into the Jinja code.

2025-09-03

SQLServerCentral Article

Advanced SQL Server Page Forensics: Detecting Page Splits and Allocations with DBCC PAGE

Page splits are an often-overlooked performance killer in SQL Server. In this article, we take a forensic look at how serial inserts differ from mid-table inserts, revealing why inserting rows out of order causes hidden page splits, increased IO, and fragmentation. Using a wide-column table, we demonstrate both scenarios and decode their impact with page-level analysis.

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2025-09-02 (first published: )

2,770 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

Deprecated but Forgotten: Why SQL Server’s Text, NText, and Image Data Types Still Haunt Your Systems

TEXT, NTEXT, and IMAGE columns have been deprecated for nearly two decades, yet they still silently haunt many SQL Server environments. This article explains their hidden limitations with practical demos and shows why migrating to VARCHAR(MAX), NVARCHAR(MAX), and VARBINARY(MAX) is critical for modern performance, maintainability, and future upgrades.

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2025-09-02 (first published: )

3,478 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

How to Access and Use Azure Key Vault Secrets in an Azure Devops Pipeline

When you run a CI/CD pipeline, you often need confidential values like passwords, authentication tokens, service principal secrets etc. when you want to deploy a certain artefact. You don’t want to store those secrets directly in your pipelines as this might pose a considerable security leak. Instead, you either store them as secret variables, or […]

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2025-09-02 (first published: )

1,496 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

MongoDB and NodeJS in action

Overview MongoDB is a popular NoSQL database used for building modern, scalable applications. In this article, we’ll cover how to set up MongoDB on Windows and connect to it using Node.js. We will also perform some basic Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) operations to ensure we understand fully on how Node.js can be made […]

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2025-09-02 (first published: )

219 reads

Blogs

T-SQL Tuesday #201 Round-Up: Temp Tables, Friend or Foe?

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Forums

Admin Rights for Everyone

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Kerberos Authentication for Aurora PostgreSQL: Mapping AD Groups to Database Roles

By Arvind Toorpu

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RegEx Functions I

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item RegEx Functions I

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Question of the Day

RegEx Functions I

Which of these RegEx functions need compatibility level 170 in SQL Server 2025?

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