I’m constantly hearing stories about terrible managers, and, of course, I’ve experienced quite a few myself. In fact, I can’t come up with many nice things to say about most managers when I look back over my career. (Luckily, my manager at Redgate is wonderful!) Early in my tech career, I was working at a […]
2020-05-16
193 reads
Healthcare workers are some of the many heroes working bravely in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. To protect themselves and their patients, they must wear face masks during their entire shifts. This causes a great deal of ear irritation, so a strap was designed to make wearing the masks easier and alleviate pressure on […]
2020-04-18
136 reads
Azure Data Studio (ADS) is a cross-platform tool that you can use to run T-SQL queries much as you have done using SQL Server Management Studio. No, the databases do not need to be hosted in Azure; the tool works fine for on-premises SQL Servers as well. I’ve started using ADS more as I teach […]
2020-03-21
222 reads
2020-01-24
310 reads
January 1st is the beginning of a new year thanks to Julius Caesar and Pope Gregory XIII. This date is somewhat arbitrary, and many religions and cultures celebrate their own beginning of a new year at different times. Even though these celebrations don’t fall at the same time, I think the sentiment is similar. The […]
2019-12-28
123 reads
It’s rare to get a call from a customer telling you that the application is fast today and thanks for taking such good care of the database. Instead, you are more likely to hear complaints when things go wrong like slow running queries and timeouts. There is a lot to consider when trying to figure […]
2019-11-30
589 reads
I like to call tempdb the “workhorse” of SQL Server. I’ve heard some other people call it other terms that were not so flattering, but since I like to keep things positive, I’ll stick with workhorse. SQL Server uses tempdb for many things. The obvious uses are temp tables and table variables, but tempdb is […]
2019-11-02
1,153 reads
I remember when Azure SQL Database was first released in 2010. Microsoft has tweaked the name a couple of times over the years, and back then it was called SQL Azure. The largest database you could create was just 50 GB, and there were quite a few restrictions, such as heaps not being supported. Since […]
2019-10-05
457 reads
When I decided to switch careers about 25 years ago, I had no idea how far I would go in tech. I just wanted to leave the profession for which I had trained and become a developer. My goal was to make the switch by the end of 1998. It actually happened in the summer […]
2019-09-07
135 reads
Microsoft announced CTP 3.2 for SQL Server 2019 just a few days ago, but many people working with SQL Server don’t care about this. I run into people at user group meetings and SQL Saturdays who are stuck supporting versions as old as SQL Server 2000, and SQL Server 2008 R2 is still prevalent. I’m […]
2019-07-27
728 reads
By Steve Jones
If someone is trying to convince you it’s not a pyramid scheme, it’s a...
By Steve Jones
I was looking back at my year and decided to see if SQL Prompt...
In the era of cloud-native applications, Kubernetes has become the default standard platform for...
Hi experts, I have a 3+ TB database on a 2019 sql server which...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The North Star for the...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Multiple Escape Characters
In SQL Server 2025, I run this code (in a database with the appropriate collation):
SELECT UNISTR('%*3041%*308A%*304C%*3068 and good night', '%*') AS 'A Classic';
What is returned? See possible answers