You should stick to using tables in SQL Server, rather than heaps that have no clustered index, unless you have well-considered reasons to choose heaps. However, there are uses for heaps in special circumstances, and it is useful to know what these uses are, and when you should avoid heaps. Uwe Ricken explains, and demonstrates why you'd be unwise to use heaps rather than tables when the data is liable to change.
2016-10-14
3,646 reads
It’s often useful to be able to create a directory of object-level scripts from an existing database, for example to put a database into version control, or search through a directory of scripts. In this simple ‘how to’ article, Feodor Georgiev expands on the four most common reasons, and shows how simple it is using SQL Compare.
2016-10-14
3,220 reads
SQL Server 2016 introduced three new objects to deal with the greater demand of data; John Miner takes a look at this new functionality.
2016-10-13
4,605 reads
Rangarajan Srirangam from the Azure Customer Advisory Team shares some tips and techniques to help achieve an efficient data migration to Azure SQL Data Warehouse.
2016-10-12
2,674 reads
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
By Brian Kelley
During COVID, I attended training on software/enterprise architecture given by Mark Richards. One of...
For me, the objective is straightforward: have a backup strategy that is reliable, understandable,...
By DesertDBA
Note: This post is the invitation for T-SQL Tuesday #204 on November 3rd, 2026....
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