Monitoring and alerting can be overwhelming tasks, especially for those new to the world of managing production data. One common challenge for any data professional is the identification and management of queries that run for longer than they should.
2026-03-09
I know a lot of y’all lag behind on upgrading SSMS, but v22.3 just introduced something that you need to be aware of. It’s going to impact any of your users who DO upgrade their SSMS, or who use Github Copilot. There’s something that you can do in order to improve Copilot’s code quality and make it match your preferred coding standards.
2026-03-06
This tip demonstrates how find and list allf duplicate rows in a dataset using a Common Table Expression (CTE).
2026-03-04
Four years ago I wrote a blog on this site explaining why Python is better than C# and, arguably, most other programming languages. To redress the balance, here are 10 reasons why you might want to avoid getting caught up in Python’s oh-so-tempting coils – particularly when building large, long-lived systems.
2026-03-02
Beginning with SQL Server Management Studio 21, Microsoft stopped providing the direct download package/binaries to install SSMS, instead it just downloads the SSMS installer. This installer then starts the installation of SSMS and downloads what is needed to install SSMS. Sometimes there may be a need to do an offline installation where you do not have access to the internet. In this article, we walk through the steps to do an offline install of SSMS.
2026-02-27
Now that SQL Server 2025 has finally been released to the public, I was finally able to test and learn a lot about this command (named CREATE EXTERNAL MODEL), and I want to share my knowledge with you here. If you’re new to the world of AI, don’t worry, we’ll start with the basics and evolve to where this command fits in!
2026-02-25
Microsoft Fabric is a unified platform for data integration, data engineering, real-time intelligence, and advanced analytics. Fabric is known for providing an integrated way of working with your data, connecting to many diverse types of sources and across the data landscape. How do we get started ingesting and analyzing real-time data streamed over the MQTT protocol?
2026-02-23
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, SQL Server Management Studio was included as part of the SQL Server installer.
2026-02-20
Today’s organization are faced with multiple conflicts for their current cloud infrastructures and which approach to go with either opting for a microservice or monolith applications. However, there are numerous difficulties with standard hosting methods.
2026-02-18
In 2026, your approach to both applications and databases must be focused on practical and technical real-world operations and use cases rather than just hype.
2026-02-16
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