This article dives into a fun (and interesting!) strategy for widening fixed-width columns in SQL Server, to reduce downtime, risk, and runtime at the time when a column’s data type needs to be changed.
2025-09-12
I recently resolved an issue where a query pulling data from the last 30 days would time out due to the table’s size and the lack of a supporting index. Creating a supporting index is possible, but not ideal; it will be very large and may not be useful for most queries and use cases. I wonder how I could implement a filtered index that follows time and is always limited to the last n days.
2025-09-10
Introduced in SQL Server 2025 CTP 1.3, the PRODUCT() function acts similarly to SUM(), but multiplies values rather than adds them. It is an aggregate function in SQL Server and therefore operates on a data set, rather than on scalar values.
2025-09-08
The advantage of using triggers is that the same processing can occur regardless of where or how the data has been inserted, updated or deleted. In this article, we look at several examples of where and why triggers could be useful along with an example use case.
2025-09-05
In this article, we’ll revisit the dimension models we created. We wrote the entire SQL statement for the dimension by hand, and the dimensions themselves were very rudimentary; they lacked a surrogate key and there were no audit columns (such as insert date and update date). We’ll show you how we can expand the dimensions using Jinja, but also how we can minimize development effort by baking reusable patterns into the Jinja code.
2025-09-03
Helping people solve T-SQL problems is one of my favorite hobbies. Someone messaged me the other day with a complex query that was almost complete except for one issue. He needed to perform a LEFT OUTER JOIN but had to filter based on a value from the right table. However, when he added the filter, SQL removed rows from the left table. The task was to decide where to place the SQL predicate: in the ON or WHERE clause.
2025-09-01
In Part 2, we shift focus from theory to practice. We will explore how organizations can harmoniously integrate both practi: the agility of DevOps and the resilience of SRE. During integration, it requires deliberate changes to culture, tooling, metrics, and collaboration patterns.
2025-08-29
We are deploying a new application that uses PostgreSQL database. My manager has asked me to design high availability into the implementation. As a SQL Server database administrator, I’ve been managing PostgreSQL databases for a while. However, I’m not sure which high availability options to implement. What are the different high availability options for PostgreSQL?
2025-08-27
Columnstore indexes are a powerful tool for storing analytic data directly in SQL Server. This feature has improved in every version of SQL Server since their inception over ten years ago, and SQL Server 2025 is no exception!
2025-08-25
While Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) are powerful, they often struggle with long-term dependencies due to the vanishing gradient problem. Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTMs) address this issue by introducing memory cells and gates. For beginners, understanding LSTM components, such as the input, output, and forget gates, can be challenging. This tip breaks down LSTMs in an intuitive way, highlighting their importance and practical applications.
2025-08-22
When mirroring was first released for Azure SQL Database, it used Change Data Capture...
By Steve Jones
One of the things I’ve tried hard to do in database development situations if...
By DataOnWheels
The T-SQL Tuesday topic this month comes James Serra. What career risks have you...
We have two "identical" instances of an ASP.NET web service (or so I have...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item OPENQUERY Flexibility
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Which of these are valid OPENQUERY() uses?
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