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.
2025-08-13
Zero-Trust Architecture (ZTA) emerges as a strong security paradigm for cloud-based AI systems, fundamentally operating on the principle of “never trust, always verify.” Unlike conventional security models, ZTA assumes potential compromise exists within the network and requires continuous verification of every access request regardless of origin.
2025-07-09
About two decades ago, I introduced the concept of transition constraints to show Data Validation in a database is a lot more complex than seeing if a string parameter really is an integer. In October of 2008, I did an article called Constraint Yourself! on how to use DDL constraints to assure data integrity. One of the topics in that piece was a look at state transition constraints via an auxiliary table.
2025-07-07
When I was perusing my LinkedIn feed the other day, I came across this thread about using SELECT *. In one of the replies, Aaron Cutshall noted that: “Another real performance killer is SELECT DISTINCT especially when combined with UNION. I have a whole list of commonly used hidden performance killers!”
2025-07-04
SQL Server 2025 improved PSPO to handle multiple predicates that might have parameter sensitivity, and that’s great! I love it when Microsoft ships a v1 feature, and then gradually iterates over to make it better. Adaptive Memory Grants were a similar investment that got improved over time, and today they’re fantastic.
2025-07-02
Your choice of how you encode data can be significant. With computers and databases, you have a wide range of options. As a programmer, you will likely be called upon at some time in your career to design and coding scheme for particular application. It would really help if you at least avoided designing a bad one.
2025-06-30
SQL Server has several functions to assist with meta data about the server, databases, indexes, and more. In this tip, we will look at how to get index information for indexes in a database using the INDEXPROPERTY function.
2025-06-27
Starting in SQL Server 2025, a new edition is available for installation: SQL Server Developer Standard Edition. This article dives into this edition, the problems it solves, and why it is a great addition for development teams that use SQL Server!
2025-06-25
There are multiple reasons for no full backup: corrupted backups, taking too much time to restore, etc. In this post, I want to show an alternative for these cases, an ace up one’s sleeve, that you can use to recover data.
2025-06-23
Microsoft does not yet support this edition of Ubuntu, but there are some workarounds to make it work. This should not be used for production usage and this blog is for educational/testing purposes only.
2025-06-20
By John
Today is Christmas and while I do not expect anybody to actual be reading...
By Bert Wagner
Until recently, my family's 90,000+ photos have been hidden away in the depths of...
By Kamil
Managing Microsoft Fabric at scale quickly becomes painful if you rely only on the...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item UNISTR Escape
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Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Art: I Made a...
In SQL Server 2025, I run this command:
SELECT UNISTR('*3041*308A*304C\3068 and good night', '*') as "A Classic";
What is returned? (assume the database has an appropriate collation)
A: 
B: 
C: 
See possible answers