For some time now, C# programmers have gazed enviously at the interactive capabilities of F#, Python and PowerShell. For rapid prototyping work and interactive debugging, dynamic languages are hard to beat. C# Interactive slipped into view quietly, without razzmatazz, in Visual Studio 2015 Update 1. It's good, it's worth knowing about; and Tom Fischer is intent on convincing you of that.
2016-10-11
5,674 reads
One of the challenges when considering migrating your on-premises SQL Server databases to Azure SQL Database is its lack of support for Active Directory-integrated authentication. With the advent of Azure SQL Database V12, the authentication capabilities have been expanded, allowing for more flexibility that leverages Azure Active Directory. In this article, Marcin Policht provides an overview of this functionality.
2016-10-10
3,995 reads
SQL Server collation is an important setting when creating database objects. One of the best ways to ensure that collation issues do not happen is to ensure that the collation settings are properly specified in the script that generates the database objects - Siddharth Mehta demonstrates how to do this.
2016-10-07
4,085 reads
Sometimes a request from a user who doesn't appreciate the limitations of the technology can jolt you into discovering that an application feature that was, until recently, difficult to achieve is suddenly relatively easy. Dino was asked to allow the user to take photographs and associate them with an item of work. After he'd recovered from the shock, he decided that it was achievable, and now describes how he went on and did it.
2016-10-06
4,818 reads
Aaron Bertrand runs some tests to challenge an assertion that CHARINDEX is always faster at pattern matching than LEFT and LIKE.
2016-10-05
3,387 reads
Greg Larson explains that SQL Server provides a couple of different ways to delete backup and restore history. If you want to remove backup and restore information for all databases based on a date you can use the sp_delete_backuphistory system stored procedure. Or you can use the system stored procedure named sp_delete_database_backuphistory if you want to remove all backup and restore history for a specific database.
2016-10-04
5,098 reads
The ALL, SOME and ANY predicates aren't much used in SQL Server, but they are there. You can use the Exists() predicate instead but the logic is more contorted and difficult to read at a glance. Set-oriented predicates can greatly simplify the answering of many real-life business questions, so it is worth getting familiar with them. Joe Celko explains.
2016-10-03
8,250 reads
Although SQL Server for Linux removes the concern that adopting SQL Server forces you to also adopt the Windows platform, it could also provide a useful alternative platform, and a more obvious alternative to Oracle. There are, however, several obvious concerns as to how such a product could ever achieve parity with the existing Windows-based product. Microsoft have made an interesting move with several ramifications, as Robert Sheldon explains.
2016-09-30
6,963 reads
There are times when you want some users to see part of a column value but not the whole thing, but you want other users to see the complete column value without any masking. The new SQL Server 2016 Dynamic Data Masking feature will allow you to define these different kinds of masking rules - Greg Larson explains.
2016-09-29
5,212 reads
DBCC CHECKDB is a built-in SQL Server command that allows you to check database integrity and consistency in one simple command, but running it on large databases can be a nightmare. In this article, Ahmad Yaseen explains how you can enhance the command to run faster in SQL Server 2016.
2016-09-28
3,423 reads
By Steve Jones
AI is a big deal in 2026, and at Redgate, we’re experimenting with how...
By Steve Jones
Another of our values: The facing page has this quote: “We admire people who...
By Ed Elliott
Running tSQLt unit tests is great from Visual Studio but my development workflow...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item No Defaults Passwords Ever
Hi, We have low latency high volume system. I have a table having 3...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Long Name
I run this code to create a table:
When I check the length, I get these results:
A table name is limited to 128 characters. How does this work?