I started out working with Microsoft Access and SQL Server back in 2000 as the only employee doing IT full-time, and worked most of my career where “big fish in a little pond” was an overstatement. Learning is scarce when you do everything and don’t work with anyone who knows more than you. In 2010 I was plunged into the Ocean and grabbed onto anything I could find to stay afloat. I wasn’t going to simply run scripts I didn’t understand, so I learned the DMVs and system tables in the scripts I found and rewrote them all. Now, I know enough where I can start giving back to a community that saved me from drowning.

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Blog Post

TempDB memory leak?

I found a bug where I’m seeing TempDB use more memory than it should on multiple versions of SQL Server, especially on servers set up with common best practices. There’s a...

2016-01-05

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Advent of Code

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2016-01-04 (first published: )

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Indexing Strategy

What do I care about when I’m playing with indexes? That’s easy. I want as few indexes as possible efficiently referenced...

2015-12-28 (first published: )

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Blogs

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VS Code, Unresolved References.

By mjdemaris

Hi all, I just started using VS Code to work with DB projects.  I...

Fun with JSON II

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Fun with JSON II

Changing Data Types

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Changing Data Types

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Question of the Day

Fun with JSON II

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 t1.[key] AS row,
       t2.*
FROM OPENJSON(
     (
         SELECT t.* FROM #test_data AS t FOR JSON PATH
     )
             ) t1
    CROSS APPLY OPENJSON(t1.value) t2;

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