2017-07-04 (first published: 2015-12-14)
11,323 reads
Articles
3 Solutions For Auditing Long SQL Server Extracts or Loads
In this post, Tim Smith looks at the different options you can use to audit your SQL Server extracts and loads during the ETL process.
2017-07-04
3,755 reads
A General Way to Maintain History Tables
You will see here a way to handle history tables. This way only takes into account Date-based data cleanup but is easily generalizable.
2017-06-30 (first published: 2015-09-28)
12,995 reads
Export data from SQL Server to Excel
What native SQL Server options are available to export to Excel? Jeremy Kadlec explains.
2017-06-30
5,930 reads
Scoring Outliers in Non-Normal Data with R
Using R to detect outliers is relatively easy, but most methods assume your data is normally distributed. How do you handle skewed datasets?
2017-06-29
5,705 reads
Azure Automation Methods
Tim Radney of SQLskills walks through multiple automation methods you can use to manage and maintain your Azure SQL Databases.
2017-06-29
3,697 reads
Replace Bad Characters in Table
Learn how to clean bad characters from lots of data in this article.
2017-06-28
3,523 reads
Generating HTML from SQL Server Queries
You can produce HTML from SQL because SQL Server has built-in support for outputting XML, and HTML is best understood as a slightly odd dialect of XML that imparts meaning to predefined tags. There are plenty of edge cases where an HTML structure is the most obvious way of communicating tables, lists and directories. Where data is hierarchical, it can make even more sense. William Brewer gives a simple introduction to a few HTML-output techniques.
2017-06-28
5,489 reads
Filegroup Restoring and Database Consistency
In this article, we'll explore a less used feature of SQL Server: filegroup restoring, feature that has an interesting consequence because database can become inconsistent without any warning and standard checks don't reveal any issue.
2017-06-27
3,706 reads
How to Read the Transaction Log File
Have you ever wanted to be able to see the actual transactions that are contained in the transaction log file? Greg Larsen shows you how to browse the transaction log using an undocumented function.
2017-06-27
4,882 reads
Blogs
The flight recorder: Replaying what an AI agent did on my SQL Server
By Arun Sirpal
“What exactly did it do on my server?” is the first question a DBA...
Announcements from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference — Barcelona 2026
By James Serra
Microsoft shared a broad set of Fabric, Power BI, and SQL updates at FabCon...
Au Revoir for now
By Steve Jones
No, I’m not quitting or retiring. Just going on vacation, but I leave tonight...
Forums
Let's Talk Certifications
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The Hidden Security Risks of Role Combination in SSAS Tabular
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Hidden Security Risks of...
The Empty Aggregate
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Empty Aggregate
Question of the Day
The Empty Aggregate
I have this table in a SQL Server 2025 database:
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[CustomerOrder] ( [OrderID] [int] NULL, [CustomerID] [int] NULL, [total] [money] NULL ) ON [PRIMARY] GOWhat is returned from this code? (answers are for the sum and then the count)
SELECT SUM(total) AS sum,
COUNT(total) AS count
FROM dbo.CustomerOrder;
See possible answers