5 T-SQL features that should already exist (2026 SQL Server wish list)
2026 T-SQL wish list covering native Parquet imports, arrays, OVERLAPS, simpler licensing, and cloud storage
2026-07-27
2026 T-SQL wish list covering native Parquet imports, arrays, OVERLAPS, simpler licensing, and cloud storage
2026-07-27
A Data Warehouse acts as a centralized repository, is subject oriented, time variant and non-volatile repository. This article covers some concepts that will help you better design these structures.
2026-07-24
This article documents a SQL injection vulnerability I discovered in sys.sp_dbmmonitorupdate, a Microsoft-signed system stored procedure. For other SQL Server security vulnerabilities I’ve discovered, see the full series here.
2026-07-22
Large databases usually have a negative impact on maintenance time, scalability and query performance. For maintenance, these large single databases have to be backed up daily while the amount of actual changing data might be small. For performance, tables without correct indexes result in full table or clustered index scans. As the data grows the total query time increase linearly. How can we decrease downtime for the maintenance window for large databases and optimize the performance of daily queries?
2026-07-20
Learn how to use VECTOR_DISTANCE and VECTOR_SEARCH in SQL Server to find semantically similar data.
2026-07-17
I work with databases for a living. I teach people, and I help them via consulting. And as far as I can remember, I’ve never written something about how b-trees work.
2026-07-15
This article examines three recurring database-layer failures documented in the EDPB’s 2026 enforcement findings: the complexity of executing erasure across relational schemas, the backup paradox that can silently undo compliant deletions, and the audit log contradiction that traps organizations between two competing obligations.
2026-07-14 (first published: 2026-07-13)
We had an issue with a SQL Server database in an Always On Availability Group (AOAG) where it was not synchronizing the secondary replica even though it was using the “Synchronous commit” Availability Mode for the secondary replica. This article explains how to troubleshoot and resolve:
2026-07-10
Learn how to call locally hosted Ollama embedding models from SQL Server using sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint
2026-07-08
In a previous tip on Orphaned User Detection for SQL Server High Availability Databases, we have seen how to identify when there are orphaned database users in an Availability Group database. Is there a way where we no longer need to worry about missing database users or different SID values between primary and secondary databases in an Availability Group?
2026-07-06
By Steve Jones
I recently started playing with the MCP Server for SQL Server, which is a...
If you spend your days tuning queries, managing pipelines, or keeping a production database...
I’ve been rebuilding my three-site SQL Server demo lab, and I ran into something...
Has anyone written a wrapper function (or similar) around STRING_AGG() to allow the retrieval...
Putting this here as we're currently on SQL Server 2019 installed on Windows Server...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Never is Not the Policy
I have added a few indexes to one of my tables in SQL Server 2025:
ALTER TABLE dbo.CustomerContact
ADD CONSTRAINT PK_CustomerContact
PRIMARY KEY (CustomerID);
-- Create index on CustomerEmail
CREATE INDEX IX_CustomerContact_CustomerEmail
ON dbo.CustomerContact (CustomerEmail);
CREATE INDEX IX_CustomerContact_CustomerPhone
ON dbo.CustomerContact (phone);
I then do this to disable one index:
alter index IX_CustomerContact_CustomerPhone on dbo.CustomerContact disableI see this when I check the index status:
I decide to rebuild all indexes with this command:
ALTER INDEX ALL ON dbo.CustomerContact rebuildAfter I do this, what will I see for the index status? See possible answers