Think twice before using table variables

T-SQL Tuesday

For T-SQL Tuesday this month Raul Gonzalez has asked us all to blog about lessons learnt the hard way:
http://www.sqldoubleg.com/2017/07/03/tsql2sday-92-lessons-learned-the-hard-way/
My...

T-SQL Tuesday 107 – Viral Demo

For this month’s T-SQL Tuesday. Jeff Mlakar invites to talk about “a project you worked on or were impacted by...

Understanding Keys and Certificates with Always Encrypted

Always Encrypted on SQL 2016 is pretty easy to set up. There’s even a single wizard to guide you through...

Understanding Keys and Certificates with Transparent Data Encryption (TDE)

I’ve been taking a bit of a deep dive into understanding Transparent Data Encryption (TDE). As part of that I’ve...

Using the built-in System Health session

When Microsoft introduced Extended Events (XE) in 2008, they also gave us a built-in XE session called system_health (though it’s...

Using the Sequence Object to Generate Reference Numbers

The SEQUENCE object was added to T-SQL in SQL Server 2012. It’s reasonably well known to DBAs, but less so...

What is Transparent Data Encryption?

Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) was introduced in SQL 2008 as a way of protecting “at rest” data. It continues to...

Attending a climate protest for the first time

This is a blog devoted to databases, but for once I’m going to go off topic and talk about something I did at the weekend that I’ve never done...

Database Fundamentals #21: Using the JOIN Operator, OUTER JOIN

The OUTER JOIN returns one complete set of data and then the matching values from the other set. The syntax is basically the same as INNER JOIN but you...

DMV - Active queries sorted by CPU usage

select
           s.session_id,

           db_name(s.database_id) DB,

           s.login_time,

           s.host_name,

           s.program_name,

           s.login_name,

           s.cpu_time,

           s.memory_usage,

           s.total_scheduled_time,

           s.total_elapsed_time,

           s.endpoint_id,

           s.last_request_start_time,

           s.last_request_end_time,

           s.reads,

           s.writes,

           s.logical_reads,

           s.is_user_process,

           s.row_count,

           s.open_transaction_count,

           t.text as [command]

from sys.dm_exec_sessions s

inner join sys.dm_exec_connections c...