From Rows to Pages: The Hidden Chaos Behind SQL Server’s Sampling Methods
Learn about the TABLESAMPLE option in T-SQL and uncover some of the pitfalls of assuming this works as you think it does.
2025-08-22
2,329 reads
Articles
Long Short-Term Memory Network for Machine Learning
While Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) are powerful, they often struggle with long-term dependencies due to the vanishing gradient problem. Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTMs) address this issue by introducing memory cells and gates. For beginners, understanding LSTM components, such as the input, output, and forget gates, can be challenging. This tip breaks down LSTMs in an intuitive way, highlighting their importance and practical applications.
2025-08-22
Contained Availability Groups in SQL Server 2022
SQL Server 2022 introduced a new feature called Contained Availability Groups. It allows the Database Administrators to effectively manage the Server Level objects, such as Logins, SQL Agent jobs, etc. in an HA environment. In today's article, we will learn about this new feature of SQL Server. The Challenge of Managing Server Objects in Availability […]
2025-08-20
10,987 reads
13 Things I wish I knew about Power Query (when I first started)
When I first started with Power Query, it was in Excel, through the Power Pivot feature. I was amazed at how I could transform data with just a few clicks and quickly create PivotTables. Then, when Power Query appeared in Power BI, I began working with larger data sources and more complex projects.
2025-08-20
Building a Database Dashboard with SSRS
Learn how to create a dynamic database dashboard that tracks key metrics using SQL Server Reporting Services. From setting up to deploying your report.
2025-08-18 (first published: 2023-07-17)
3,811 reads
Split strings by Regular Expressions in SQL Server 2025
SQL Server users have been asking for native regular expression support for over two decades. There are third-party Common Language Runtime (CLR) modules that offer this functionality, but these can be complicated to install and simply aren’t possible in some environments. I want to split a string using a regular expression instead of a static string. Will that be possible in SQL Server 2025, without CLR?
2025-08-18
How to create your custom GPT SQL Expert
Introduction ChatGPT includes custom GPTs. You can create your own custom GPT. In this article, we will demonstrate how to create a custom GPT expert in SQL Server. Requirements To create your own GPT, you need to use the paid version of ChatGPT. First, go to ChatGPT. Secondly, if you don’t have the paid version, […]
2025-08-15 (first published: 2025-08-11)
5,340 reads
Securing the Data Layer: Why SQL Developers Should Care About App-Level Vulnerabilities
Meta Description: App-level vulnerabilities can co...
2025-08-15 (first published: 2025-06-12)
107 reads
Common SQL Server Problems: Network Related or Instance Specific Error Occurred
This is the first in a series of articles meant to provide practical solutions to common issues. In this post, we’ll talk about one of the most pervasive error messages out there:
2025-08-15
Enable TDE for Databases in a SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Group
A customer has a database that is already set up in a SQL Server Availability Group. Since this database hosts sensitive data, there is a need to encrypt the primary and all secondary replicas of the data. In this article, we will walk through how this can be done.
2025-08-13
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
Implementing Type 4 Slowly Changing Dimensions in SQL Server
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Implementing Type 4 Slowly Changing...
The Disabled Index
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Disabled Index
Server-Level Table sizes
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Server-Level Table sizes
Question of the Day
The Disabled Index
I run this code on SQL Server 2022.
CREATE TABLE Drink
(
drinkid INT NOT NULL
CONSTRAINT DrinkPK PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED,
drinkname VARCHAR(20),
rating NUMERIC(2, 1)
)
GO
INSERT INTO Drink
(
drinkid,
drinkname,
rating
)
VALUES
(1, 'Margarita', 4.5),
(2, 'Mojito', 4.3),
(3, 'Old Fashioned', 4.7),
(4, 'Martini', 4.4),
(5, 'Cosmopolitan', 4.2)
GO
ALTER INDEX drinkpk ON dbo.drink DISABLE
GO
SELECT * FROM dbo.Drink
GO
What is the result? See possible answers