SQLBalls

Bradley Ball is a Sr. Azure FastTrack Customer Engineer for Microsoft, and former Data Platform MVP. During his IT career Bradley has spent 8 years working as a Defense contractor for clients such as the U.S. Army, The Executive Office of the President of the United States for the Obama Administration, and is the former Data Platform Practice Manager for Pragmatic Works Consulting, now 3Cloud. He has presented at SQL Saturdays, SSUG's, SQL Rally, DevConnections, SQLBits, SQL Live 360, and the PASS Summit. Bradley co-hosts the Tales From The Field YouTube show https://aka.ms/TftF/youtube , he can also be found blogging on https://www.SQLBalls.com

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Blog Post

Optimize For Unknown

Hello Dear Reader!  It's been a while.  I was working with a friend and we came across an interesting problem....

2016-12-21 (first published: )

3,324 reads

Optimize For Unknown

Hello Dear Reader!  It's been a while.  I was working with a friend and we came across an interesting problem.  They had a large amount of skewness/data skew.  This...

2016-12-05

7 reads

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Blogs

Power BI Performance in 2026: A Practical Guide to Faster Semantic Models and Reports

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Originally published April 2022; substantially updated July 2026. This post is a complete replacement...

Getting Started with Azure SQL Developer on Macbook

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The idea behind Azure SQL Developer is for anyone to build, iterate, and test...

AI Experiments: Claude Solved a DAB Issue

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I’m sure many of you are using AI regularly, perhaps chatting, perhaps using some...

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Forums

SQL Agent Job Automated Change Capture Process

By James Greaves

Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Agent Job Automated Change...

Another Model, More Data Loss

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Another Model, More Data Loss

Finding a Database Master Key

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Finding a Database Master Key

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Question of the Day

Finding a Database Master Key

Where do I check for the existence of a Database Master Key (DMK) in SQL Server 2025?

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