Advice for Learning T-SQL SELECT Statement Step By Step
In this tip, Dallas Snider shares his experience with how someone can start learning T-SQL from the beginning with no prior knowledge.
2015-02-09
8,946 reads
Additional Articles
Release Testing Is Risk Management Theatre
The adoption of Continuous Delivery often leads to the discovery of suboptimal practices within an organisation, and the Release Testing antipattern is a common example. Steve Smith explores the questions: what is Release Testing, and why is it an example of Risk Management Theatre?
2015-02-06
7,118 reads
SQL Saturday #374 - Vienna, Austria
SQL Saturday is a full-day technical conference and training event with international speakers. With over 20 sessions on SQL Server and a separate pre-con, the event is aimed at all those interested in SQL Server - from pros to beginners. This event will be on February 28, 2015, so register while space is available.
2015-02-06
6,987 reads
Microsoft Azure Storage Queues Part 3: Security and Performance Tips
After discussion the main concepts and basic API calls for Azure Storage Queues in parts 1 and 2 of this series, Roman Schacherl turns his focus to two topics that no one likes to implement but everybody needs: security and performance.
2015-02-05
7,183 reads
Centralize Your Database Monitoring Process
SQL Server Data Collector, together with Management Data Warehouse, is a fine and useful component for gathering information centrally about how SQL Server instances are being used, and thereby keeping an eye out for problems. It comes into its own when you have figured out how to configure it to run on maybe hundreds of instances using Central Management Server. Dennes describes how to tame the system so that it scales.
2015-02-04
8,923 reads
Managing the Big Data Technical Staff
Big data is everywhere, and most large IT enterprises have installed one or more big data applications. These applications provide fast access to large stores of data, usually customer or sales data. Your technical staff that supports these applications and the systems that analyze and consume the data didn't exist ten years ago. Who are these new IT professionals, and how should you manage them?
2015-02-03
8,327 reads
Amazon's Aurora: A Distributed SQL Database Alternative For MySQL Applications
SQL-based distributed Cloud Relational databases aren't new, but Amazon's Aurora offers an alternative to SQL Azure, and, being MySQL-compatible, provides the obvious route to the cloud for hosted LAMP web applications.
2015-02-02
8,160 reads
How to get ETL Horribly Wrong
ETL ( Extract, transform, load) doesn't have to be like a spell on hell. To make a success of ETL systems, you need the freedom and ability to make graceful U-turns when you detect a mistake in architecture or configuration: to fix the root problem rather than to merely tackle the symptoms. Feodor lists the eight most common root causes of failure in ETL systems, and how to fix them.
2015-01-30
13,243 reads
Using T-SQL to Perform Z-Score Column Normalization in SQL Server
In data mining, we sometimes need to perform techniques such as Z-score normalization on numeric data type columns to prevent one column from skewing or dominating the models produced by the machine learning algorithms. Dallas Snider explains how to perform this in SQL Server with T-SQL code.
2015-01-29
9,049 reads
Why Developers Need to Understand Execution Plans
If you can examine and understand execution plans, you can achieve better understanding of the database system and you will write better database code. Grant Fritchey shows you how.
2015-01-28
9,282 reads
Blogs
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...
March 2026 SQL Server Security Updates
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On Patch Tuesday, in addition to OS and Office security patches, Microsoft also released...
How Fabric Mirroring Transformed with SQL Server 2025
When mirroring was first released for Azure SQL Database, it used Change Data Capture...
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Upgrading Admin Queries
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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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