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Unlocking the Power of FULL OUTER JOIN in SQL: Performance, Use Cases & Examples

The JOIN statement is one of the most common operations SQL developers perform. Yet in a world ruled by Inner and Left Joins, the poor Full Outer Join is like Cinderella before the ball – allowed out on only the rarest of occasions. In an (unscientific) survey I once performed of SQL developers at one Fortune 100 firm, half of the developers had never used a Full Outer Join in production code, and the rest had used it in a tiny handful of occasions.

2025-10-01

External Article

Building a Dynamic Countdown Timer in Power BI

A countdown timer can be a powerful visual tool in many Business Intelligence reporting scenarios. This could be for marketing campaigns, contract expiries, and business deals with clients. Real-time countdown visuals are not natively supported in Power BI. Although, there is the Count Down Timer custom visual, which is not dynamic in its configuration.

2025-09-29

External Article

Side by Side Upgrade to SQL Server 2022

As a SQL Server DBA, the migration of SQL Server from an existing version to the latest version is a usual activity. In today’s cloud-oriented world, many organizations still prefer an on-prem environment; my organization is one of them. There are multiple reasons to keep your data on-prem, like having more privacy and control of the environment. Currently, our major project is to migrate our existing Microsoft SQL Server 2019 to SQL Server 2022. Recently, we completed the POC. Today, let’s discuss the steps of the SQL Server 2022 installation and migration of our databases.

2025-09-24

External Article

Getting Started with Bayesian Modeling

Multivariate analysis in data science is a type of analysis that tackles multiple input/predictor and output/predicted variables. This tip explores the problem of predicting air pollution measured in particulate matter (PM) concentration based on ambient temperature, humidity, and pressure using a Bayesian Model.

2025-09-19

External Article

How to Measure Replication Latency in SQL Server AlwaysOn Synchronous Availability Groups

Synchronous replicas in SQL Server Availability Groups promise no data loss, but they don’t promise zero delay; under heavy load they can still fall behind. This article shows how to measure and track that hidden replication delay using SQL Server performance counters, so you can see how well your system keeps up during IO‑intensive operations and plan maintenance more safely.

2025-09-17

External Article

A Rolling Filtered Index in SQL Server

I recently resolved an issue where a query pulling data from the last 30 days would time out due to the table’s size and the lack of a supporting index. Creating a supporting index is possible, but not ideal; it will be very large and may not be useful for most queries and use cases. I wonder how I could implement a filtered index that follows time and is always limited to the last n days.

2025-09-10

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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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