Connect with your SQL Community on Slack
Slack is a popular tool for team interaction. To describe it quickly, it's a feature-rich persistent chat room, with threads,...
2025-09-25 (first published: 2017-05-04)
609 reads
Will Assaf
Easily query your GitHub Contribution activity
For a variety of reasons, including your Microsoft MVP activity reports, you might want to summarize your GitHub activity across multiple repos. For contributors to Microsoft open-source docs on GitHub,...
2025-06-20 (first published: 2025-06-05)
295 reads
Migrate datetime data to datetimeoffset with AT TIME ZONE
I recently reviewed, worked on, and added a similar example to the DATETIMEOFFSET Microsoft Learn Docs article at the recommendation of my colleague Randolph West, who guessed (accurately) I...
2024-05-22 (first published: 2024-05-03)
408 reads
Tips, ideas, and recommendations on your technical blog
This technical blog is hardly the ideal, but I'll use this space here to summarize some of the guidance that my colleague Randolph West and I presented at a...
2023-11-13 (first published: 2023-10-27)
387 reads
Updated training list for a new DBA
Met an eager young volunteer at SQLSatBR over the weekend who inspired me to update a blog post that hadn't been refreshed in a few years. See the [UPDATED] Training...
2023-08-18 (first published: 2023-07-31)
616 reads
SQLSat Baton Rouge 2023!
Looking forward to #jambalaya at #SQLSatBR on July 29! Register today: sqlsatbr.comI hope to see as many people as possible that weekend, I'll be there at the Friday night...
2023-07-22 (first published: 2023-07-21)
35 reads
SQL Server 2022 Administration Inside Out
SQL Server 2022 Administration Inside Out is now available for pre-order from Microsoft Press. This book is far more than a quick update. We've rewritten and refreshed large portions of...
2023-03-25 (first published: 2023-03-24)
131 reads
30 Interview Questions for a Database Administrator and Developer
This blog post summarizes the type of technical questions I would ask candidates for a Microsoft SQL Server data platform administrator and database developer role.Hopefully this helps both candidates...
2023-03-08 (first published: 2023-02-28)
1,318 reads
Q&A on certification exams, exam prep, and test-taking skills
Part 2 of 2. This blog post is co-authored by Ajayi Anwansedo, PhD and William Assaf, who met and worked together at The Futures Fund, a STEM non-profit which offers introductory coding and...
2023-02-03 (first published: 2023-01-23)
286 reads
Exam Cram with DataWeekender talk - Think Like a Certification Exam
Fresh off of a two-part, co-authored blog series on certification exams and test-taking prep, I've got a fresh batch of fun sample questions for the January 2023 Data Weekender Exam...
2023-01-24
26 reads
Blogs
Methodology for dealing with bad data in production
By Brian Kelley
Pinal Dave wrote up his methodology for what to do when you discover bad...
How to Provision an Azure SQL Database
Aside from spinning up a SQL Server instance container, the free Azure SQL Database...
Claude finds two cryptographic weaknesses (but the sky isn’t falling)
By Brian Kelley
If you haven't seen the announcement, Anthropic was able to utilize Claude (Mythos Preview)...
Forums
Why SQL Server Database Attach fails and how to repair it
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Why SQL Server Database Attach...
Fixing P1 Queries
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Fixing P1 Queries
BIT_COUNT() IV
Comments posted to this topic are about the item BIT_COUNT() IV
Question of the Day
BIT_COUNT() IV
In SQL Server 2025, I run this code:
select bit_count('A')
What is returned? See possible answers