Additional Articles


External Article

How to Script Dimensions with data build tool (dbt) Macros

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

External Article

Picking the ON or WHERE Clause for the SQL Predicate

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

External Article

Long Short-Term Memory Network for Machine Learning

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

External Article

Split strings by Regular Expressions in SQL Server 2025

SQL Server users have been asking for native regular expression support for over two decades. There are third-party Common Language Runtime (CLR) modules that offer this functionality, but these can be complicated to install and simply aren’t possible in some environments. I want to split a string using a regular expression instead of a static string. Will that be possible in SQL Server 2025, without CLR?

2025-08-18

Technical Article

Enable TDE for Databases in a SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Group

A customer has a database that is already set up in a SQL Server Availability Group. Since this database hosts sensitive data, there is a need to encrypt the primary and all secondary replicas of the data. In this article, we will walk through how this can be done.

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2025-08-13

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A Challenge of Our Knowledge

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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The memory toll of VARCHAR(MAX) in SQL Server

By sabyda

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Transaction Log Truncation

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Question of the Day

Transaction Log Truncation

In SQL Server 2025, where can I find information about items that prevent or delay the transaction log truncation?

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