Power BI designer is based upon the Power Query formula language informally known as "M". Unfortunately, the advanced editor inside the Power BI designer does not support syntax highlighting, meaning it can be easy to make mistakes. Matt Mason shows how you can extend the Notepad++ editor to support this feature.
2015-12-03
3,200 reads
In this follow-up to Beyond the LIKE Operator: Advanced Pattern Matching with MySQL, Rob Gravelle shows how to use the REGEXP operator to match alphanumeric characters, explores the role of meta-characters, and compares standard regular expression syntax to that of MySQL.
2015-12-02
3,785 reads
PowerShell is an ideal tool for doing health-checks of a collection of SQL Server instances, and there are several examples around, but few acknowledge the fact that individual DBAs have their own priorities for tests, and need something easily changed to suit circumstances. Omid Afzalalghom's Healthcheck allows tests to be SQL or PowerShell and requires only adding, altering or deleting files in directories.
2015-12-01
4,827 reads
Glenn Berry introduces the exciting new feature in Windows Server 2016 called Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), which enables organizations to use multiple, clustered commodity file server nodes to build highly available, scalable storage systems with local storage, using SATA, SAS, or PCIe NVMe devices.
2015-11-30
2,839 reads
Tim Wise explains how Microsoft Access provides a quick and easy way to create a simple front end for a SQL Server database by pointing linked tables to the SQL Server.
2015-11-27
2,764 reads
There are more exciting things in life than unit testing SQL Statements, checking the results, timings, and execution plans. Phil Factor demonstrates a PowerShell-based technique taking the tedium out of testing SQL DML.
2015-11-26
3,247 reads
Sandeep Mittal provides an introduction to the COALESCE function and shows how to use it.
2015-11-25
4,572 reads
Transparent Data Encryption offers the ability to encrypt content of the database, its transaction logs, as well as backups while at rest. Encryption and decryption are performed in real-time, at the individual page level, as the database is being written to and read from storage, without necessitating changes to applications accessing their data. Marcin Policht reviews the feature.
2015-11-24
4,471 reads
In SQL Server, heaps are rightly treated with suspicion. Although there are rare cases where they perform well, they are likely to be the cause of poor performance. If a table is likely to have a large number of changes, then it can become fragmented due to way that space is allocated and forward pointers used. How does one detect this problem? Is it significant? How does one deal with it, if necessary? Neeraj Tripathi explains.
2015-11-23
3,694 reads
There may be some people who enjoy repetitive typing, but Grant Fritchey doesn't. He's always preferred SQL Prompt. The standard snippets suit developers fine but aren't so DBA-oriented, so he set about asking the SQLServerCentral community what they typed in the most, and set about producing a set of DBA snippets with the results.
2015-11-20
4,144 reads
By Steve Jones
Learn how to tie a bowline knot. Practice in the dark. With one hand....
By HeyMo0sh
As a DevOps practitioner, I’ve always focused on performance, scalability, and automation. But as...
By Brian Kelley
On Patch Tuesday, in addition to OS and Office security patches, Microsoft also released...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Multiple Deployment Processes
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How to Use sqlpackage to...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item 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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