One of the challenges when considering migrating your on-premises SQL Server databases to Azure SQL Database is its lack of support for Active Directory-integrated authentication. With the advent of Azure SQL Database V12, the authentication capabilities have been expanded, allowing for more flexibility that leverages Azure Active Directory. In this article, Marcin Policht provides an overview of this functionality.
2016-10-10
3,995 reads
Set-based programming doesn’t mean “no loops” or a single statement. Finding out the best ways to traverse a full hierarchy.
2016-10-07 (first published: 2015-07-27)
24,812 reads
SQL Server collation is an important setting when creating database objects. One of the best ways to ensure that collation issues do not happen is to ensure that the collation settings are properly specified in the script that generates the database objects - Siddharth Mehta demonstrates how to do this.
2016-10-07
4,085 reads
Sometimes a request from a user who doesn't appreciate the limitations of the technology can jolt you into discovering that an application feature that was, until recently, difficult to achieve is suddenly relatively easy. Dino was asked to allow the user to take photographs and associate them with an item of work. After he'd recovered from the shock, he decided that it was achievable, and now describes how he went on and did it.
2016-10-06
4,818 reads
Aaron Bertrand runs some tests to challenge an assertion that CHARINDEX is always faster at pattern matching than LEFT and LIKE.
2016-10-05
3,387 reads
When we administer a SQL Database, we always have to work with files. This new article shows how to handle them using PowerShell.
2016-10-04
3,134 reads
Greg Larson explains that SQL Server provides a couple of different ways to delete backup and restore history. If you want to remove backup and restore information for all databases based on a date you can use the sp_delete_backuphistory system stored procedure. Or you can use the system stored procedure named sp_delete_database_backuphistory if you want to remove all backup and restore history for a specific database.
2016-10-04
5,098 reads
Data types are an important part of how tables and variables work. Did you know that constants have databases too?
2016-10-03
1,662 reads
The ALL, SOME and ANY predicates aren't much used in SQL Server, but they are there. You can use the Exists() predicate instead but the logic is more contorted and difficult to read at a glance. Set-oriented predicates can greatly simplify the answering of many real-life business questions, so it is worth getting familiar with them. Joe Celko explains.
2016-10-03
8,250 reads
Although SQL Server for Linux removes the concern that adopting SQL Server forces you to also adopt the Windows platform, it could also provide a useful alternative platform, and a more obvious alternative to Oracle. There are, however, several obvious concerns as to how such a product could ever achieve parity with the existing Windows-based product. Microsoft have made an interesting move with several ramifications, as Robert Sheldon explains.
2016-09-30
6,963 reads
Slow-running queries can degrade your Redshift cluster’s performance and lead to increased costs. Identifying...
By gbargsley
If you've been here before, you know this blog is usually about SQL Server,...
I’ve been doing storage load tests for SQL Server for a long time, both...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How Long is a Long...
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In SQL Server 2025, a long I/O is recorded in the error log with message 833. How long much an I/O request be outstanding before this message is written to the log?
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