Kevin3NF

Kevin Hill is a career SQL Server DBA living in Dallas, TX. His specialities include HA/DR, Best Practice configuration, Performance tuning and teaching new and accidental DBAs
  • Interests: Cycling, family, sci-fi, DBA stuff

Blog Post

Ad Hoc SQL Server Help

I just need a few hours of your time… We get a variation of this request a LOT. So now it’s time to do something about it! Ad Hoc...

2026-03-02

51 reads

Blog Post

SQL Server Alerts

Don’t Let Trouble Sneak Up on You   Most SQL Servers run quietly. Until they don’t. By the time someone notices an application outage or a failed backup, you’re...

2025-11-03 (first published: )

364 reads

Blog Post

SQL Server is Slow, part 3 of 4

In parts 1 and 2 of this series, we’ve gathered info and done the triage just like anyone in almost any industry does At this point you’ve: Defined what...

2025-10-27 (first published: )

1,762 reads

Blog Post

SQL Server Migration Overview

It’s Not Just Backup / Restore At some point every company faces it: the SQL Server that’s been quietly running for years is due for retirement. Maybe the hardware...

2025-10-22

42 reads

Blog Post

SQL Server Is Slow (part 1 of 4)

How should you respond when you get the dreaded Email/Slack/Text/DriveBy from someone yelling at you that SQL Server is slow?   Stop. Don’t Open SSMS Yet. You’ve heard it...

2025-10-08 (first published: )

449 reads

Blogs

Goodbye, Microsoft

By

A few years ago I took a new job at Microsoft, working as a...

The SUM of Nothing: #SQLNewBlogger

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I caught this interesting item over on Pinal Dave’s blog: Eleven Interview Questions that...

How to Move the SSMS Status Bar to the Top and Color-Code SQL Server Connections

By

I use color-coded connections in SSMS to distinguish Production, Pre-Production, UAT, and Development. But...

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Forums

Today's AI

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Today's AI

Split Large Queries in Athena with a Simple Modulo Trick

By Rahul Gupta

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Split Large Queries in Athena...

Finding Trailing Spaces

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Finding Trailing Spaces

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Question of the Day

Finding Trailing Spaces

I have some data in a SQL Server 2025 database. It looks like this for the dbo.Customer table:

CustomerID CustomerName PreferredName
1          Steve        Steve               
2          Andy         Andy               
3          Brian        Brian               
4          Allan        Allan               
5          Devin        Devin               
6          Steve        Steve               
7          Sally        Sally
I want to detect which names have a single trailing space. The CustomerName is a varchar() and the PreferredName is a CHAR(). Does this query detect the problem rows?
SELECT 
       CustomerID,
       CustomerName,
       PreferredName
FROM Customer
WHERE CustomerName <> RTRIM(CustomerName)
OR PreferredName <> RTRIM(PreferredName);

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