What is Code Coverage For?

Code coverage is a practice that goes hand in hand with automated testing, reporting the percentage of your code that has been exercised during a test run. Ed Elliott and Redgate have partnered to make a code coverage tool available for SQL Server, both free and open source. SQL Cover measures the coverage of your SQL Server stored procedures and functions. It has built-in support for the popular tSQLt unit testing framework, but can also be used alongside any automated testing framework of your choosing. Find out more in this blog post.

Changes to a Writable Partition May Fail Unexpectedly

Paul White shows how an update may fail when a partition has some data on a read-only filegroup, and explains several workarounds.

How to fix SQL Server deadlocks with monitoring

Learn about deadlocks and how you might better troubleshoot the issues involved.

The 2015/2016 Simple-Talk Awards: Winners Announced

The 2015/16 Simple-Talk Awards have concluded, the votes have been counted and recounted, and the winners have now been announced.

Getting Started with Temporal Table in SQL Server 2016 – Part 1

With the new temporal table feature, SQL Server 2016 internally manages two tables: a base table, which contains the latest data all the time, and a history table, which contains a history of all of the changes. Arshad Ali looks at the new feature, how it works, and how to either create a new table with this feature or enable it for an existing table.

Finding Special Characters within Character Strings

Special Characters can lead to many problems. Identifying and reporting on them can save a lot of headache down the road.

The Comeback of Migrations-Based Deployments

With database deployments, not all script-based processes are equal. Some use change scripts in a free-and-easy way, and some, which are normally called ‘migrations-based approaches’, have more discipline around them. In this article, Redgate Product Manager Elizabeth Ayer covers ‘migrations’, and shows some of the benefits that have come with new tooling which is specifically designed to assist the change script processes.

Exploring SQL Server 2016 Dynamic Data Masking – Part Two - Masking and Exporting Data in Existing Tables

Dynamic Data Masking allows you to obscure your confidential data column values at the database engine level for both new and existing SQL Server data. Being able to alter the definition of an existing column to add a masking rule makes it very simple to obscure your existing column values without even changing your application code.

Byte Me: Spy Where?

Performance Surprises and Assumptions: STRING_SPLIT

SQL Server 2016 RC0 introduces a new native string splitting function, STRING_SPLIT. In this article, Aaron Bertrand compares its performance to existing methods.