Articles

External Article

SQL Server Temporal Tables: How-To Recipes

Tables that return the value of the data in the table at a particular point of time have been with us since the first relational database, but have always required special queries and constraints, and can be tricky to get right. System-versioned Temporal Tables, new in SQL Server 2016, make such tables behave like any other. How do you create one, or modify an existing table? How can you get an In-Memory Optimized OLTP table to be Temporal? Alex Grinberg shows how.

2017-05-30

3,726 reads

External Article

Generating Plots Automatically From PowerShell and SQL Server Using Gnuplot

When you are automating a number of tasks, or performing a batch of tests, you want a way of automating the production of your plots and graphs. Nothing beats a good graphical plot for giving the indications of how the process went. If you are using PowerShell and maybe also SQL Server, it pays to use a command-line plotting tool such as Gnuplot to do all the hard work. It turns out to be handy for a range of data jobs, turning PowerShell into a handy data science tool.

2017-05-29

3,301 reads

External Article

Using striped backups with SQL Clone

If you’re a Redgate SQL Backup customer, occasionally you’ll need to convert your SQL Backup (.sqb) files to the native SQL Server backup format (.bak), perhaps to perform native database restores on a server where SQL Backup isn’t installed. This produces a striped backup, because each thread used when making the backup will produce a separate file. Can we use a striped backup produced in this way, or indeed any striped backup, as the source for a SQL Clone image? Short answer: we can! Let’s see how that works.

2017-05-29

2,237 reads

External Article

Getting Started with Azure SQL Data Warehouse - Part 4

Azure SQL Data Warehouse is a new enterprise-class, elastic petabyte-scale, data warehouse service. Join Arshad Ali as he discusses round-robin and distributed tables, and how to create them. He also discusses how partitioning works in SQL Data Warehouse and looks at the impact of choosing the right distribution key. As a bonus Arshad shows you how to leverage PolyBase to quickly and easily import or export data from SQL Data Warehouse.

2017-05-25

3,392 reads

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Question of the Day

The Large Encoded Value

I want to use the new BASE64_ENCODE() function in SQL Server 2025, but return a string that isn't large type. What is the longest varbinary string I can pass in and still get a varchar(8000) returned?

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