SQLBalls

Bradley Ball is a Sr. Azure FastTrack Customer Engineer for Microsoft, and former Data Platform MVP. During his IT career Bradley has spent 8 years working as a Defense contractor for clients such as the U.S. Army, The Executive Office of the President of the United States for the Obama Administration, and is the former Data Platform Practice Manager for Pragmatic Works Consulting, now 3Cloud. He has presented at SQL Saturdays, SSUG's, SQL Rally, DevConnections, SQLBits, SQL Live 360, and the PASS Summit. Bradley co-hosts the Tales From The Field YouTube show https://aka.ms/TftF/youtube , he can also be found blogging on https://www.SQLBalls.com

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Blog Post

Optimize For Unknown

Hello Dear Reader!  It's been a while.  I was working with a friend and we came across an interesting problem....

2016-12-21 (first published: )

3,320 reads

Optimize For Unknown

Hello Dear Reader!  It's been a while.  I was working with a friend and we came across an interesting problem.  They had a large amount of skewness/data skew.  This...

2016-12-05

6 reads

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Blogs

“We love to debate minutiae”

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I am guilty as charged. The quote was in reference to how people argue...

Advice I Like: Knots

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Learn how to tie a bowline knot. Practice in the dark. With one hand....

Shifting Mindsets: Why FinOps is Essential for Cloud Efficiency

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As a DevOps practitioner, I’ve always focused on performance, scalability, and automation. But as...

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Forums

Windows logins for users migrated from DomainA to DomainB

By a.koopman

Hi, I have a SQL Server instance where users connect to via Windows Authentication,...

Multiple Deployment Processes

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Multiple Deployment Processes

How to Use sqlpackage to Detect Schema Drift Between Azure SQL Databases

By Kunal Rathi

Comments posted to this topic are about the item How to Use sqlpackage to...

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Question of the Day

Upgrading Admin Queries

I have a query from a former DBA that we run on SQL Server 2025 to check on database metadata. This query references sys.sysaltfiles. I want to refactor this code to be more modern. Which DMV should I reference instead?  

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