You have a Power BI project that generates real-time reports for an inventory management system that uses SQL Server. You are aware that Power BI performance is heavily influenced by how your data is structured in SQL Server but don’t have a clear understanding of how to optimize your SQL data structure for Power BI. In this article, we look at different ways to structure the data and tables to help improve Power BI query performance.
2025-10-13
Spotting synchronization disconnects between a primary and a secondary data center in a distributed availability group configuration can be hard, so here are valuable tools to help you with it
2025-10-10
1,031 reads
Running Postgres in Docker is great for a quick test but what if you want it to behave like a proper, production-style setup with SSL encryption, certificate-based authentication, persistent volumes, and custom configurations? In this article, we’ll find out how
2025-10-10
Searching for a string in database tables has been discussed over the years. There are several approaches to the problem (see References at the end of the article). See how to use SQL to find a string in different types of SQL Server objects and data.
2025-10-08
This article shows how you can find which objects in your database might not be valid after schema changes.
2025-10-06
9,026 reads
SQL Server 2025 introduces a new sys.dm_os_memory_health_history view to make it easier for meatbags like you and robots like Copilot to know if the SQL Server has been under memory pressure recently.
2025-10-06
Here are a few things every Oracle DBA should know about performance in their databases.
2025-10-03
1,384 reads
Data is usually the most important asset in organizations, but only SQL developers can frequently access that data. Technical teams often write queries for non-technical users. This restricts agility, slows decision-making, and creates a bottleneck in data accessibility. One possible remedy is natural language processing (NLP), which enables users to ask questions in simple English and receive answers without knowing any code. Still, the majority of NLP-to-SQL solutions are cloud-based, which raises issues with cost and privacy.
2025-10-03
Learn how a setting an improve high concurrency inserts with the OPTIMIZE_FOR_SEQUENTIAL_KEY option.
2025-10-01
5,247 reads
The JOIN statement is one of the most common operations SQL developers perform. Yet in a world ruled by Inner and Left Joins, the poor Full Outer Join is like Cinderella before the ball – allowed out on only the rarest of occasions. In an (unscientific) survey I once performed of SQL developers at one Fortune 100 firm, half of the developers had never used a Full Outer Join in production code, and the rest had used it in a tiny handful of occasions.
2025-10-01
SQL Server 2025 RTM is here, and if you’re running Docker on macOS, you...
By Steve Jones
It’s Monday. I’ve been home since Fri night, but with a busy weekend, I’m...
By Brian Kelley
I mentioned this in my talk on Quantum Computing at the PASS Data Community...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Ending Substring
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Comments posted to this topic are about the item Configuring the On-Premises Data Gateway:...
In Azure SQL Database and SQL Server 2025, if I run this, what is returned?
SELECT '[' + SUBSTRING('Steve Jones', 7) + ']' See possible answers