TDE and DDM

Someone asked a question about TDE (Transparent Data Encryption) and DDM (Dynamic Data Masking), which are two different technologies that...

The Default Frame for Window Functions

Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as...

The Eleven Days of Festivus 2018

It’s that time again! My Eleven Days of Festivus blogging extravaganza is now in its third year, and I’m happy...

Things I Learned at Summit v20 - Visual Studio Code

Part of a series of posts on cool stuff I learned at PASS Summit v20 (2018) - in this post we'll...

A curious case of case when and Null values

For some reason I have always written my Case statements using the following logic:

SELECT
CASE
WHEN @Priority = 1 THEN 'Very High'
WHEN @Priority...

Bulk insert and an identity column

TL;DR; BULK INSERT doesn’t have an easy way to specify a column list so the columns in the insert file...

Getting the SQL Version from a backup using dbatools ………. on PowerShell Core

Following an upgrade to SQL Server the backup share had a number of backups, some from the old version and...

Lessons from the Phoenix Project–Leave Slack

Not @Slack, but slack time, time when you aren’t buried on a particular project.
In the book, The Phoenix Project, the...

Some databases may show a NULL collation in the sys.databases DMV

While working on my Swart’s Ten Percent Rule post last week, I needed to test the Windows version of the...

Some differences with SQL Server when running on AWS RDS

If you plan on using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host your SQL Server based applications in the cloud, then...