Kenneth Fisher

My name is Kenneth Fisher and I am Senior DBA for a large (multi-national) insurance company. I have been working with databases for over 20 years starting with Clarion and Foxpro. I’ve been working with SQL Server for 12 years but have only really started “studying” the subject for the last 3. I don’t have any real "specialities" but I enjoy trouble shooting and teaching. Thus far I’ve earned by MCITP Database Administrator 2008, MCTS Database Administrator 2005, and MCTS Database Developer 2008. I’m currently studying for my MCITP Database Developer 2008 and should start in on the 2012 exams next year. My blog is at https://sqlstudies.com/.

Finding active DTS packages

by Kenneth Fisher

SQLStudies

DTS is dead, long live SSIS. Way back when SQL 2005 was announced then released DTS was pronounced DOA. SSIS...

2013-12-09 (first published: 2013-11-27)

3,181 reads

Undocumented functionality in FORMATMESSAGE

by Kenneth Fisher

SQLStudies

I was reading a rather interesting post on stackexchange “Why is % a forbidden char in a THROW message?” (which is...

2013-12-09

1,496 reads

Insert into a table using only default values

by Kenneth Fisher

SQLStudies

A while back I talked about the DEFAULT keyword and using it to tell SQL to use the default value...

2013-12-04

1,057 reads

Why do DBAs like to say “It Depends” so much?

by Kenneth Fisher

SQLStudies

Well the short answer is that they just don’t have enough information to give a definitive answer. You will notice...

2013-12-02

649 reads

Finding the metadata for a query

by Kenneth Fisher

SQLStudies

You know I occasionally find it interesting how I learn new things. I was running through a practice test for...

2013-11-25

2,369 reads

A pattern to do beginning of period calculations.

by Kenneth Fisher

SQLStudies

Beginning of period calculations are common things. Rolling month reports, queries to pull everything from last month etc require beginning...

2013-11-20

757 reads

Connection options in SSMS

by Kenneth Fisher

SQLStudies

When connecting to a SQL Server instance in SSMS there are a fair number of options. Most DBAs I know...

2013-11-18

1,581 reads

Who’s on call

by Kenneth Fisher

SQLStudies

Every morning we have a daily meeting and my manager asks who’s on call. And every morning some form of...

2013-11-13

594 reads

A better way to find missing indexes

by Kenneth Fisher

SQLStudies

I recently attended SQL Saturday #255 and specifically the performance tuning pre-con put on by Grant Fritchey. It was a...

2013-11-11

944 reads

sp_SrvPermissions & sp_DBPermissions V3.0

by Kenneth Fisher

SQLStudies

These are a couple of stored procedures I wrote to help me with security research. Each sp returns three data...

2013-11-11 (first published: 2013-11-04)

1,853 reads

Blogs

What DevOps Look Like in Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric (not to be confused with the more general term “fabric” in DevOps)...

T-SQL Tuesday #192: What career risks have you taken?

I’m honored to be hosting T-SQL Tuesday — edition #192. For those who may...

AI: Blog a Day – Day 3: LLM Models – Open Source vs Closed Source

By Vinay Thakur

Continuing from Day 2 , we learned introduction on Generative AI and Agentic AI,...

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Forums

Azure Synapse database refresh

By Sreevathsa Mandli

Hi Team, I am trying to refresh the Azure Synapse Dedicated pool from production...

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Looking for a creative and experienced mobile game development company that brings your game...

how to write this query?

hi everyone I am not sure how to write the query that will produce...

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Question of the Day

Fun with JSON I

I have some data in a table:

CREATE TABLE #test_data
(
    id INT PRIMARY KEY,
    name VARCHAR(100),
    birth_date DATE
);

-- Step 2: Insert rows  
INSERT INTO #test_data
VALUES
(1, 'Olivia', '2025-01-05'),
(2, 'Emma', '2025-03-02'),
(3, 'Liam', '2025-11-15'),
(4, 'Noah', '2025-12-22');

If I run this query, how many rows are returned?

SELECT *
FROM OPENJSON(
     (
         SELECT t.* FROM #test_data AS t FOR JSON PATH
     )
             ) t;

See possible answers