In this article, Pat Wright explains how to identify hidden risks in legacy applications before moving to the cloud. It features practical advice and guidance to avoid migration failures and surprises.
2026-04-01
Companies generate a huge amount of data on a daily basis from such things as sales transactions, inventory changes, and customer interactions. This data originates from different data sources and is stored in operational databases called OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) systems that primary focuses on transactions like data inserts, updates or deletes. Maintaining the transactional data in an OLTP database is important. However, if you need to analyze or report on the data, storing the data in a centralized repository in well-structured schema is necessary.
2026-03-30
There’s a new version of SQL Server released and we’re mainly an on-premises SQL Server shop. We’ve been using Integration Services (SSIS) for years now for all our ETL and data integration needs. With Microsoft’s focus on cloud (Azure and Fabric), does it make sense to upgrade our SSIS packages? Are there any new features?
2026-03-27
There’s not much to database keys, right? When you build a new table, you add a column to act as the primary key, then set it to auto-generate. Done. That’s all there is to know…right?
2026-03-25
Parallelism can reduce concurrency. This is a strong reason not to allow SQL Server to execute queries aggressively in parallel mode. In this tip, I will set up a demo to show that parallelism reduces query performance on a server with high concurrency.
2026-03-23
Every few years, someone asks a familiar question: do we really still need to disable the sa account in SQL Server? After all, it’s 2026. SQL Server has better encryption, better auditing, better defaults, and more security features than ever before. Surely this old guidance belongs in the past?
2026-03-20
SQL Server Management Studio keeps adding features, but unless you look you probably don’t notice. In this article, we look at the new Query Hint Recommendation Tool in SSMS 2022 and how this can be used.
2026-03-18
LinkedIn is full of absolute trash these days. Just flat out b****** garbage. (Oh yeah, that – this post should probably come with a language disclaimer, because this stuff makes me mad.)
2026-03-16
SSMS 22 has several new features. Is there a compilation list of the new features? How will these features help me as a SQL Server professional?
2026-03-13
rogrammatic interaction with SQL Server or Azure SQL from a Python script is possible using a driver. A popular driver has been pyodbc that can be used standalone or with a SQLAlchemy wrapper. SQLAlchemy on its own is the Python SQL toolkit and Object Relational Mapper for developers. In the end of 2025 Microsoft released v1 of their own Python SQL driver called mssql-python. How do you get started using mssql-python for programmatic access to your SQL Server?
2026-03-11
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