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
Learn a bit about the different results you get from the PERCENT_RANK and CUME_DIST aggregate functions.
2019-06-27
13,062 reads
2019-06-17
4,882 reads
Many of us checked to make sure it wasn’t April Fools Day a couple of years ago when Microsoft announced that SQL Server 2017 would run on Linux. This means that some shops who want to run SQL Server, but not Windows Server, now can. But it also means that SQL Server professionals need to […]
2019-06-15
212 reads
Kathi Kellenberger discusses the challenge of deciding how to describe the content in the sessions she presents.
2019-06-10
370 reads
Aunt Kathi remembers all the SQL Server versions she has worked with over the years.
2019-04-20
398 reads
By Andy Warren
Somehow two years have elapsed since my last update; hopefully it won’t be that...
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...
I have table: t1 in schema1 with 19 billion records. I have another table...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Minimally Viable Security
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Encoding NULL
What is returned from this code in SQL Server 2025?
SELECT BASE64_ENCODE(NULL)See possible answers