MAXDOP, Parallelism and the Cloud
Parallelism and MAXDOP The pros and cons of parallelism have always been with us in SQL Server and I blogged about this a couple of years ago. This is...
2019-04-26 (first published: 2019-04-03)
2,234 reads
Matthew McGiffen DBA
Finding “Orphaned” database files – script
When you drop a database from a SQL Server instance the underlying files are usually removed. This doesn’t happen however if you set the database to be offline first,...
2019-03-27
50 reads
Checking Progress of the Creation of your Azure Resources
When I’ve created resources in Azure it’s usually taken from a few minutes and up to quarter of an hour...
2019-02-26
838 reads
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...
2019-04-26 (first published: 2019-02-20)
4,065 reads
There’s got to be a better way
For T-SQL Tuesday #111, Andy Leonard asks “What is your why? Why do you do what you do?”
Like Andy, I...
2019-02-12
663 reads
“SSPI handshake failed” \ “The login is from an untrusted domain” errors
I’ve recently encountered an issue that was difficult to resolve and I didn’t find the particular cause that was troubling...
2019-04-26 (first published: 2019-02-12)
2,959 reads
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...
2018-12-12
822 reads
Extended Events Made Easy – Sorting, Grouping and Aggregation
When I’m using Profiler to analyse performance issues I often save the results to a table, or upload a trace...
2019-04-26 (first published: 2018-10-16)
2,116 reads
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...
2019-04-26 (first published: 2018-10-09)
1,868 reads
Checking for Membership of a Specific Active Directory Group
As part of my job I manage a bunch of SQL instances for Development and Test.
Access is managed though Active...
2019-04-26 (first published: 2018-10-02)
2,312 reads
Blogs
The Book of Redgate: Spread across the world
By Steve Jones
This was Redgate in 2010, spread across the globe. First the EU/US Here’s Asia...
Merry Christmas
By John
Today is Christmas and while I do not expect anybody to actual be reading...
Self-Hosting a Photo Server the Whole Family Can Use
By Bert Wagner
Until recently, my family's 90,000+ photos have been hidden away in the depths of...
Forums
Happy Holidays, Let's Do Nerdy Stuff
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Happy Holidays, Let's Do Nerdy...
UNISTR Escape
Comments posted to this topic are about the item UNISTR Escape
Celebrating Tomorrow
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Celebrating Tomorrow
Question of the Day
UNISTR Escape
In SQL Server 2025, I run this command:
SELECT UNISTR('*3041*308A*304C\3068 and good night', '*') as "A Classic";
What is returned? (assume the database has an appropriate collation)
A: 
B: 
C: 
See possible answers