Brian Kelley

Brian Kelley is an author, columnist, and Microsoft SQL Server MVP focusing primarily on SQL Server security. He is a contributing author for How to Cheat at Securing SQL Server 2005 (Syngress), Professional SQL Server 2008 Administration (Wrox), and Introduction to SQL Server (Texas Publishing). Brian currently serves as an infrastructure and security architect. He has also served as a senior Microsoft SQL Server DBA, database architect, developer, and incident response team lead.
  • Interests: Chess, Reading, Soccer (Football), Baseball, Animals, Theology

SQLServerCentral Article

A Normalization Primer

For most DBAs, normalization is an understood concept, a bread and butter bit of knowledge. However, it is not at all unusual to review a database design by a development group for an OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) environment and find that the schema chosen is anything but properly normalized. This article by Brian Kelley will give you the core knowledge to data model.

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2003-01-13

18,925 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

Information Schema Views

SQL Server DBAs are often curious about the inner-workings of SQL Server. Indeed, it can save your job during disasters to know what's going on inside SQL Server. This article shows you how to use some of the SQL Server internal views to view some meta data about your servers.

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2002-01-09

17,626 reads

Technical Article

Report Locking on Specific Database

This Script reports locking on a particular database either to the console or to a database table. It also allows filtering based on a minimum locking level (say Page or Table and higher). Included is the CREATE TABLE statement to build the reporting table. This table can reside in any database but needs to be […]

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2002-01-06

1,071 reads

SQLServerCentral Article

Design Oversight - Preliminary Review

We all know what the ideal application design environment is for building a database back-end: an experienced DBA takes inputs from end users and developers and creates the database design in order to support the application being developed. But in reality, we don't get the opportunity to do application design like this very often. This article covers how to quickly find and fix problems in a design.

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2001-08-20

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Blogs

How to Clear the SSMS Cache (SSMS 21 and Later)

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How to Clear the SSMS Cache (SSMS 21 and Later) Updated...

The flight recorder: Replaying what an AI agent did on my SQL Server

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“What exactly did it do on my server?” is the first question a DBA...

Announcements from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference — Barcelona 2026

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Microsoft shared a broad set of Fabric, Power BI, and SQL updates at FabCon...

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Forums

Let's Talk Certifications

By Grant Fritchey

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Let's Talk Certifications

The Hidden Security Risks of Role Combination in SSAS Tabular

By Pablo Echeverria

Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Hidden Security Risks of...

The Empty Aggregate

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Empty Aggregate

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Question of the Day

The Empty Aggregate

I have this table in a SQL Server 2025 database:

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[CustomerOrder]
(
[OrderID] [int] NULL,
[CustomerID] [int] NULL,
[total] [money] NULL
) ON [PRIMARY]
GO
What is returned from this code? (answers are for the sum and then the count)
SELECT SUM(total) AS sum,
       COUNT(total) AS count
FROM dbo.CustomerOrder;



See possible answers