Why Don't You Upgrade in Place?
Is there a reason to upgrade your SQL Server in place instead of building a new instance? Andy Warren has a few thoughts today on why this might be the right choice.
2023-12-20
5,974 reads
Andy Warren
Restore With Standby; A Review and A Lesson Learned
A lesson learned when trying to restore backups with standby. You can't upgrade versions.
2023-09-25
9,851 reads
Monitoring the Number of Connections
Monitoring your SQL Server is important. This article examines one of the metrics you might want to keep an eye on.
2021-02-26 (first published: 2019-02-26)
47,339 reads
A Pattern Based Approach to Masking Errors
A few years ago I had a requirement to allow both developers and customers to see rows from a table used to store error information while making sure that any PII, PCI or similar sensitive data was not displayed. The tolerance for “oops” was low! This article presents one way to solve the challenge by […]
2020-04-27
1,769 reads
Worst Practices - Objects Not Owned by DBO
Last week Andy launched a new series about Worst Practices by talking about why the Hungarian naming convention is bad for column names. This week he's at it again, declaring that the practice of having objects owned by anyone other than dbo is BAD! Agree or disagree, we think you'll enjoy reading this article and adding your thoughts to the discussion!
2019-08-01 (first published: 2002-09-12)
38,436 reads
Worst Practices - Part 1 of a Very Long Series!
Andy starts a new series about Worst Practices - come find out why and read about the first one on his list - using Hungarian Notation for column names!
2019-08-01 (first published: 2001-10-09)
34,398 reads
Error Logging Gone Wild
Many of have applications that log errors to a table. Ever thought about what happens when an application starts to throw a lot of errors? This article looks at the problem and some of the responses you might consider having ready in case it happens to you!
2016-10-11
1,809 reads
If SQL Server Runs on Linux, What's Left for April Fools Day
It’s still a bit hard to believe that SQL Server will soon run on Linux. If you think back to the early days of SQL 7, 2000, even 2005, who would have bet any money on it ever happening?
2016-04-01
2,222 reads
Time to Rebrand
I became a SQL guy back in 1998 because the company that hired me used SQL Server. It’s been a good ride and it’s paid the bills, but after 15 years or so it’s time to do something different.
2015-04-01
6,297 reads
Solid State Tapes–Prelaunch News!
In the world of data it’s always been about speed. SSD’s have become very common on consumer machines and not unusual in corporate datacenters.
2014-03-31
3,135 reads
Blogs
Advice I Like: Respect
By Steve Jones
“Don’t aim to have others like you; aim to have them respect you.” –...
Blue Sky Programming – The Optimism Trap
Many years ago, before I joined Oracle, I was working on a major modernisation...
Setting Up a Mac for Data Engineering and AI Work
If you work with data pipelines, SQL, notebooks, or machine learning models, a Mac...
Forums
SQL Art, Part 4: Happy 4th of July — A British DBA's Guide to Celebrating a War We Don't Talk About
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Art, Part 4: Happy...
locking down agent for new user on our dev machine
hi , a new user wants to be able to add sql agent jobs...
SQL Server Enum Implementation: A Single-Row View Strategy for Avoiding Magic Values
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server Enum Implementation: A...
Question of the Day
BIT_COUNT I
In SQL Server 2025, I have a table (dbo.UserPermission) that contains this data:
UserID UserPermissions 15 23 37What is returned when I run this code:
select bit_count(UserPermissions) as PermissionCount from dbo.UserPermission where UserID = 3;See possible answers