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

18,734 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

17,582 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

8,216 reads

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Fun with JSON II

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Fun with JSON II

Changing Data Types

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Changing Data Types

Answering Questions On Dropped Columns

By Cláudio Silva

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Answering Questions On Dropped Columns

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Question of the Day

Fun with JSON II

I have some data in a table:

CREATE TABLE #test_data
(
    id INT PRIMARY KEY,
    name VARCHAR(100),
    birth_date DATE
);

-- Step 2: Insert rows  
INSERT INTO #test_data
VALUES
(1, 'Olivia', '2025-01-05'),
(2, 'Emma', '2025-03-02'),
(3, 'Liam', '2025-11-15'),
(4, 'Noah', '2025-12-22');
If I run this query, how many rows are returned?
SELECT t1.[key] AS row,
       t2.*
FROM OPENJSON(
     (
         SELECT t.* FROM #test_data AS t FOR JSON PATH
     )
             ) t1
    CROSS APPLY OPENJSON(t1.value) t2;

See possible answers