PowerShell Just Enough Administration

A major difficulty for a System Administrator who wishes to provide access for auditors, Helpdesk staff, developers and other IT people is that adminstrator roles give users more access than they need. It is too easy to make mistakes, or to make more changes than those that were signed-off. With JEA, it is possible to create role-based access control (RBAC) endpoints that define precisely what actions you’ll let your users carry out without needing a elevated, privileged administrator credentials, and which log and report all operations.

Automatically upload SQL Server Database Backups to Azure with Integration Services

Daniel Calbimonte shows how the Feature pack in SQL Server Integration Services can connect to Azure to automatically copy your SQL Server database backups.

Developing Redgate’s SQL Toolbelt

Take a look behind the scenes to learn more about Redgate’s development challenges, what role the SQL Toolbelt plays, and which releases are coming up.

Using OVER() to Fix Bad Version Numbers

See how the OVER() clause was used in a live system to fix overlapping field version numbers.

Free-Con Pre-Con at the Pass Summit 2016

A free day of training on Monday, October 24 in Seattle this year. Join MCMs, MVPs, and Friends of Redgate for a free day of training.

In-Memory OLTP: Row Visibility in SQL Server’s MVCC

SQL Server's In-memory OLTP is fast, due to its multi-valued concurrency control (MVCC). MVCC avoids the need for locks by arranging for each user connected to the database to see a snapshot of the rows of the tables at a point in time, No changes made by the user will be seen by other users of the database until the changes have been completed and committed. It is conceptually simple but does the user always see the correct version of a row under all circumstances? Shel Burkow explains.

DELETE Operation in SQL Server HEAPs

You should stick to using tables in SQL Server, rather than heaps that have no clustered index, unless you have well-considered reasons to choose heaps. However, there are uses for heaps in special circumstances, and it is useful to know what these uses are, and when you should avoid heaps. Uwe Ricken explains, and demonstrates why you'd be unwise to use heaps rather than tables when the data is liable to change.

How to create a directory of object-level scripts using SQL Compare

It’s often useful to be able to create a directory of object-level scripts from an existing database, for example to put a database into version control, or search through a directory of scripts. In this simple ‘how to’ article, Feodor Georgiev expands on the four most common reasons, and shows how simple it is using SQL Compare.

SQL Server 2016 New Date Objects

SQL Server 2016 introduced three new objects to deal with the greater demand of data; John Miner takes a look at this new functionality.

Byte Me: Development Haze