Altering a Column with NOT NULL
A short piece, as I ran into the need recently to alter a column to NOT NULL status. I’ve rarely...
2015-03-12
794 reads
Exam Prep 70-463: Deploying projects in SSIS 2012
This post is part of a series on this blog that will help me, and hopefully you, pass exam 70-463: Implementing...
2015-04-07 (first published: 2015-03-12)
7,245 reads
Monitoring for Timeouts
The question came up at SQL Rally, “Can you use Extended Events to monitor for query timeouts?”
My immediate response was...
2015-03-20 (first published: 2015-03-12)
7,647 reads
Lessons Learned from a Poor-performing VIEW
It is a “common knowledge” among SQL practitioners that VIEWs don’t perform well. Recently during an application’s development I put...
2015-03-20 (first published: 2015-03-12)
8,933 reads
SQL backup directly to Azure storage
Most companies required to keep their database backup offsite (on tape) for many years due to audit requirement. This normally...
2015-03-12
974 reads
Future of Database Mirroring
One of the beloved feature of SQL server standard edition for HA is database mirroring, since you only have 2-node...
2015-03-12
498 reads
Data Compression–A unique feature PART–II TIP #92
In last post TIP #91 we talked about What is Data compression ? What are the features ? Now in this tip...
2015-03-11
633 reads
Why I don’t (yet) recommend In-Memory OLTP to my customers
Ok, some of you will hate me after this blog posting, but it has to be said. Over the last...
2015-03-11
802 reads
T-SQL – How to get the Financial Quarter details of a date field
declare @table table
(
[Paid Date] date
)
insert into @table
values('20150102'),('20150512'),('20150830'),('20151231'),('20141230')
;WITH Quarters AS (
SELECT Q = 'Q1', MonthBegin = 1, MonthEnd = 3 UNION
SELECT Q = 'Q2',...
2015-03-19 (first published: 2015-03-11)
7,796 reads
Using Solutions in SSMS
There are a handful of scripts I use on a regular basis. Adam Mechanic’s (b/t) sp_WhoIsActive, My sp_DBPermissions and sp_SrvPermissions,...
2015-03-11
1,239 reads
Blogs
The flight recorder: Replaying what an AI agent did on my SQL Server
By Arun Sirpal
“What exactly did it do on my server?” is the first question a DBA...
Announcements from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference — Barcelona 2026
By James Serra
Microsoft shared a broad set of Fabric, Power BI, and SQL updates at FabCon...
Au Revoir for now
By Steve Jones
No, I’m not quitting or retiring. Just going on vacation, but I leave tonight...
Forums
Let's Talk Certifications
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Let's Talk Certifications, which is...
The Hidden Security Risks of Role Combination in SSAS Tabular
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Hidden Security Risks of...
The Empty Aggregate
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Empty Aggregate
Question of the Day
The Empty Aggregate
I have this table in a SQL Server 2025 database:
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[CustomerOrder] ( [OrderID] [int] NULL, [CustomerID] [int] NULL, [total] [money] NULL ) ON [PRIMARY] GOWhat is returned from this code? (answers are for the sum and then the count)
SELECT SUM(total) AS sum,
COUNT(total) AS count
FROM dbo.CustomerOrder;
See possible answers