Which Should You Use: VARCHAR or NVARCHAR?
You’re building a new table or adding a column, and you wanna know which datatype to use: VARCHAR or NVARCHAR?
2025-11-03
Data Storage
Identify Tables With Dropped Columns
How easily can we find tables with dropped columns that need cleanup?
2024-06-07
2,577 reads
Long Term Storage
Long term data storage isn't something we always need for databases, but it is something the world needs. A new technology has promise for those use cases, both in durability and preserving the algorithms needed.
2022-06-24
387 reads
Do We Care About Disks?
I ran across a tip on MSSQLTips from Joe Gavin recently, and it got me thinking about hardware and disks. For a lot of us, we deal with servers and storage, and not disks. While we might have a disk on a laptop or desktop, most of the production systems just attach to remote storage. […]
2021-11-03
296 reads
Storage 101: Welcome to the Wonderful World of Storage
Understanding all the storage options available to...
2019-12-30
SQL Server Storage Internals 101
This article is an extract from the book Tribal SQL. In this article, Mark S. Rasmussen offers a concise introduction to the physical storage internals behind SQL Server databases. He doesn't dive into every detail, but provides a simple, clear picture of how SQL Server stores data.
2013-10-21
3,767 reads
Blogs
Advice I Like: Respect
By Steve Jones
“Don’t aim to have others like you; aim to have them respect you.” –...
Setting Up a Mac for Data Engineering and AI Work
If you work with data pipelines, SQL, notebooks, or machine learning models, a Mac...
Want to look at cloud reporting but not sure what the costs will be?
By ChrisJenkins
Have you been thinking about migrating your reporting to Microsoft Fabric or Snowflake but...
Forums
SQL Art, Part 4: Happy 4th of July — A British DBA's Guide to Celebrating a War We Don't Talk About
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Art, Part 4: Happy...
locking down agent for new user on our dev machine
hi , a new user wants to be able to add sql agent jobs...
SQL Server Enum Implementation: A Single-Row View Strategy for Avoiding Magic Values
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server Enum Implementation: A...
Question of the Day
BIT_COUNT I
In SQL Server 2025, I have a table (dbo.UserPermission) that contains this data:
UserID UserPermissions 15 23 37What is returned when I run this code:
select bit_count(UserPermissions) as PermissionCount from dbo.UserPermission where UserID = 3;See possible answers