A Pattern for PIVOT

Use of the PIVOT operator in T-SQL has always been tantalizing yet confounding to me.  It offers the promise of...

Baton Rouge SQLSaturday #150 & Tech Day–DBA 1 track

August 4th of this year will be the forth annual Baton Rouge SQL Saturday and Tech Day. Patrick LeBlanc got...

Identifying Long Running SQL Agent Jobs Script

I’m usually pretty hesitant to share scripts I write because inevitably it will get torn to pieces, but in this...

Securing Database Contents with Transparent Data Encryption (TDE)

Introduction
Microsoft SQL Server has many security features available within the database, but until release of SQL Server 2008 there has...

SQL Server 2012 Diagnostic Information Queries (July 2012)

Here is the latest version of my SQL Server 2012 Diagnostic Information Queries, with some minor tweaks and improvements to...

5 Reasons Why I Need To Go To SQLskills Immersion Training

I was thinking about the contest that SQL Sentry is running for a week of SQLskills Immersion Training, and the...

Backup Master Database

The story came from a question someone asked me.

Does Master database support full recovery mode?

As I remembered, by default,...

Basic SQL Interview Questions

We decided to add blog post that covers only basic SQL Interview questions and answers. The blog currently provides only...

Data Manipulation Language

In this blog post we describe what is Data Manipulation Language (DML) and include this article in our exam guide...

Lost in Translation – Deprecated System Tables – sysconstraints

This post is part of a blog series which focuses on translating compatibility views in SQL Server to their respective...