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Proactively monitor your SQL Server estate with SQL Monitor 9

Learn how you can gain estate-wide views of disk space usage, backups and other jobs, and application of recent SQL Server updates and patches, with SQL Monitor 9’s Estate pages. Using this feature, teams can review the overall health of all their servers and databases, identify potential issues before they escalate into real problems, and assign priorities, proactively.

2019-08-28

External Article

Graphical Tools for Accessing Azure Cosmos DB

While the most common methods of interacting with Azure Cosmos DB involve programmatic access, there are times when you might want to perform a quick change or take a peek at some of documents in a collection. In such instances, it is typically more convenient to rely on the graphical interface. Fortunately, there are several options you can use to accomplish.

2019-08-27

External Article

Cracking DAX – the EARLIER and RANKX Functions

So far in this series, Andy Brown of Wise Owl Training has shed light on functions like CALCULATE, VALUES and FILTER, but it’s only when you understand the idiosyncrasies of the EARLIER function that you can claim to have genuinely cracked DAX. This article gives four examples of the use of this peculiar function, in the process explaining why it has such a misleading name. Using the EARLIER function properly all boils down (as is so often the case with DAX) to understanding row and filter context. The article also shows how to use the RANKX function to sort data into your required order.

2019-08-26

External Article

Scaling SQL Monitor with your growing estate

Tony Davis describes the features and capabilities of SQL Monitor that allow it to scale smoothly to monitor a growing estate of servers and databases, while still providing a single, simple dashboard that gives the team all of the essential SQL Server metrics and alerts, establishes baselines, and detects trends in behavior.

2019-08-23

Blogs

Shifting Mindsets: Why FinOps is Essential for Cloud Efficiency

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As a DevOps practitioner, I’ve always focused on performance, scalability, and automation. But as...

March 2026 SQL Server Security Updates

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On Patch Tuesday, in addition to OS and Office security patches, Microsoft also released...

How Fabric Mirroring Transformed with SQL Server 2025

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When mirroring was first released for Azure SQL Database, it used Change Data Capture...

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Multiple Deployment Processes

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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How to Use sqlpackage to Detect Schema Drift Between Azure SQL Databases

By Kunal Rathi

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Upgrading Admin Queries

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Question of the Day

Upgrading Admin Queries

I have a query from a former DBA that we run on SQL Server 2025 to check on database metadata. This query references sys.sysaltfiles. I want to refactor this code to be more modern. Which DMV should I reference instead?  

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