SQL Database: How to Configure Active Geo-Replication

Active Geo-location is powerful magic for ensuring the high availability of a Azure SQL database, and for disaster-recovery. In choosing the best options, you need to accurately understand the value that the business places on the service you're running, long it will take for a secondary replica to be in synch with the primary replica, the importance of spreading the location of replicas widely, and the maximum tolerable unscheduled downtime. Just clicking all the options could prove to be expensive.

Byte Me: Cloud Storage

Real-time Operational Analytics in SQL Server 2016 - Part 2

Arshad Ali discusses the different design considerations for leveraging the Real-time Operational Analytics feature of SQL Server 2016, covering the different scenarios where it fits or does not fit, and how to get started with it for disk based tables.

Database Nonsense - Unstructured Data

Sloppy terminology leads to big misunderstandings. Terms don't get much sloppier than "Unstructured data".

Managing Registered servers with SQL Powershell

Learn how to generate Registered Servers with PowerShell in this article.

Master Data Services – The Basics

Master Data Services (MDS) is Microsoft's platform for supporting Master Data Management (MDM). A system like MDS, if properly maintained, gives organisations a powerful alternative to increasingly having to centralize databases as a way of preventing data from getting out sync or become inconsistent, and a reliable way of managing the flow of data through corporate IT systems. It makes microservice architectures realistic. Hari Yadav shows you how to get up and running with MDS.

The Sort that Spills to Level 15,000

Paul White shows that SQL Server sometimes produces very misleading information about the impact of sort operations.

JSON Select - Easily query values from JSON

Introducing JSON Select - a new library that makes it easy to pull values out of JSON strings in SQL Server 2005+

Memory/Storage Technology Hierarchy and SQL Server

Glenn Berry discusses the ever-changing landscape of memory/storage technology, and how it relates to SQL Server workloads on Windows servers.

Basic Data Manipulation for Relational Data in R

In this post I will attempt to explore simple commands to manipulate data pulled in from a SQL database into R.