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

SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances

Old Reliable Still Matters If you’ve been around SQL Server for a while, you’ve heard of Failover Cluster Instances (FCIs). They’ve been part of SQL’s high availability toolbox since...

2025-09-19 (first published: )

210 reads

Blog Post

SQL Server Availability Groups

Flexibility and Scale at the Database Level When SQL Server 2012 introduced Availability Groups (AGs), they changed the HA/DR game. Unlike Failover Cluster Instances (FCIs), which protect the whole...

2025-09-10

23 reads

Blog Post

SQL Server Backups: The Basics

If you’re responsible for a SQL Server instance, you need working, consistent backups. Not just a .bak file here and there, but a plan that runs automatically and covers...

2025-08-20

30 reads

Blog Post

SQL Server Maintenance Plans

If you’re a DBA, sysadmin, IT manager, or Accidental DBA, you’ve probably seen SQL Server’s built-in Maintenance Plans. They live right there in SSMS under the “Management” node, quietly...

2025-08-15 (first published: )

426 reads

Blogs

AI: Blog a Day – Day 5: Notebooks, Hugging face models and Fine Tuning

By

Continuing from Day 4 where we learned Encoder, Decoder, and Attention Mechanism, today we...

AI: Blog a Day – Day 4: Transformers – Encoder, Decoder, and Attention

By

Continuing from Day 3 where we covered LLM models open/closed and their parameters, Today...

Flyway Tips: Multiple Projects

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One of the nice things about Flyway Desktop is that it helps you manage...

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Forums

Can an Azure App Service Managed Identity be used for SQL Login?

By jasona.work

I'm fairly certain I know the answer to this from digging into it yesterday,...

Azure Synapse database refresh

By Sreevathsa Mandli

Hi Team, I am trying to refresh the Azure Synapse Dedicated pool from production...

how to write this query?

By water490

hi everyone I am not sure how to write the query that will produce...

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Question of the Day

Fun with JSON I

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 *
FROM OPENJSON(
     (
         SELECT t.* FROM #test_data AS t FOR JSON PATH
     )
             ) t;

See possible answers