Using the Default Trace in SQL Server
I have heard of the default trace in SQL Server. I know it’s on by default, but I don’t know how to use it. What can I do with the default trace?
2025-04-18
Additional Articles
Securing the DevOps Pipeline Part 1: Tools and Strategies for Safer Deployments
DevOps has transformed software delivery, but with rapid deployments come increased security risks. As a DevOps engineer, I’ve seen firsthand how small security oversights can lead to major vulnerabilities.
2025-04-16
How to Remove Constraints from a SQL Server Table
I need to drop constraints on a number of my SQL Server tables. Most of our constraints are primary key and foreign keys, but there are other constraints too. How can we script it so it will deploy with a pipeline in a repeatable manner?
2025-04-14
The complexity of using Power BI in US Sovereign Clouds
If you do a search for “sovereign cloud,” you will find that most of the cloud providers have their own Sovereign Cloud if you are interested in the concept for any other cloud services you need to use. In this article, I am going to look specifically at how you extend this support to Power BI, and make a few suggestions for how I think it could work better.
2025-04-11
Killing a SPID and Checking Rollback progress in SQL Server
From time to time, I encounter blocking situations where I end up issuing a SQL KILL command against the blocking SPID. When I run sp_who2, I can see the killed SPID is in a ROLLBACK state. Is there any way I can get an idea of how long the rollback for the SPID will take?
2025-04-09
Introduction to GitHub Actions Part 1: Getting Started
This article series will teach you what you need to know to take advantage of GitHub Actions, especially for deploying database code.
2025-04-07
DAX CASE Statement Functionality using IF, SWITCH and SWITCH True
If you don’t know, DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) is a language for creating custom calculations and aggregations in Power Pivot, Power BI, and other data analysis tools. Two functions in DAX come close to replicating the functionality but come with limitations. Which one of these functions should you use?
2025-04-04
Scales & Measurements
If you’re going to work with databases, you probably ought to know something about data. In particular, we don’t put data directly into a database; we have to encode it and represent it in a format which a machine can handle.
2025-04-02
Finding Out What Changed in a Cumulative Update
Over the last several years, Microsoft has been putting less and less effort into Cumulative Update documentation. We used to get full-blown knowledge base articles about fixes, but these days, we get a collection of footnotes with deceiving hyperlinks that look like they’re going to lead to more information – but they simply lead back to themselves.
2025-03-31
Basic Regex Emulator for SQL Server
Regular expressions (REGEX) let you adaptively investigate, employ, and authenticate text data. This makes it easy to search for simple or complex string patters. There is no direct way to do this in SQL Server, but in this article we look at some SQL functions you can create to emulate regex like functionality.
2025-03-28
Blogs
How Fabric Mirroring Transformed with SQL Server 2025
When mirroring was first released for Azure SQL Database, it used Change Data Capture...
The DIY Cost of Masking Test Data For Smaller Organizations
By Steve Jones
One of the things I’ve tried hard to do in database development situations if...
T-SQL Tuesday #196 – Two risky career decisions I made
By DataOnWheels
The T-SQL Tuesday topic this month comes James Serra. What career risks have you...
Forums
Memes and Humor: Lightening Up Open Source AI News
This delightful corner of our community celebrates the lighter, funnier side of artificial intelligence,...
XACT_ABORT being set to ON by web services
We have two "identical" instances of an ASP.NET web service (or so I have...
OPENQUERY Flexibility
Comments posted to this topic are about the item OPENQUERY Flexibility
Question of the Day
OPENQUERY Flexibility
Which of these are valid OPENQUERY() uses?
See possible answers