SQL Server Threats
Is your SQL Server truly secure? Here are the top cyber threats targeting it. Learn how you can stop them before it strikes.
2025-09-02 (first published: 2025-08-07)
3,246 reads
Uncategorized
Deprecated but Forgotten: Why SQL Server’s Text, NText, and Image Data Types Still Haunt Your Systems
TEXT, NTEXT, and IMAGE columns have been deprecated for nearly two decades, yet they still silently haunt many SQL Server environments. This article explains their hidden limitations with practical demos and shows why migrating to VARCHAR(MAX), NVARCHAR(MAX), and VARBINARY(MAX) is critical for modern performance, maintainability, and future upgrades.
2025-09-02 (first published: 2025-08-06)
3,591 reads
Why CQRS and Event Sourcing Are Gaining Ground in High-Concurrency Web Systems
In web app development company boardrooms, architects and engineers are debating old assumptions. Scaling up isn’t just about faster servers or better caching anymore. It’s about reshaping how systems think. CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) and Event Sourcing are no longer fringe ideas. They’re becoming default choices in high-concurrency systems where consistency, auditability, and performance […]
2025-09-02 (first published: 2025-08-06)
740 reads
2025-08-06
1,862 reads
The Double-Edged Sword of AI and Data Democratization
Agentic AI is often hailed as a game-changer by organizations, bringing autonomous decision-making, intelligent automation, and powerful predictive capabilities. However, as organizations rush to leverage these technologies, those dealing with critical data in relational databases, documents and datasets, especially personally identifiable information (PII) face a harsh reality: moving AI projects from proof-of-concept to production is […]
2025-08-06
167 reads
Yet another Date Dimension
Evolution of code The thing with any bit of code that has been around for a while, is that when change comes along, the tendency is to cater for the change by adding new stuff, while nothing gets taken away. Some stuff has definitely been taken away from this Date Dimension, but some historical artefacts […]
2025-09-02 (first published: 2025-08-05)
3,077 reads
2025-08-05
1,830 reads
Advanced SQL Server Page Forensics: Detecting Page Splits and Allocations with DBCC PAGE
Page splits are an often-overlooked performance killer in SQL Server. In this article, we take a forensic look at how serial inserts differ from mid-table inserts, revealing why inserting rows out of order causes hidden page splits, increased IO, and fragmentation. Using a wide-column table, we demonstrate both scenarios and decode their impact with page-level analysis.
2025-09-02 (first published: 2025-08-05)
2,819 reads
How to Access and Use Azure Key Vault Secrets in an Azure Devops Pipeline
When you run a CI/CD pipeline, you often need confidential values like passwords, authentication tokens, service principal secrets etc. when you want to deploy a certain artefact. You don’t want to store those secrets directly in your pipelines as this might pose a considerable security leak. Instead, you either store them as secret variables, or […]
2025-09-02 (first published: 2025-08-04)
1,509 reads
2025-09-02 (first published: 2025-08-04)
1,044 reads
Blogs
Running a Local LLM On Your Laptop Resources
By Steve Jones
Thanks to everyone that attended my sessions at VS Live San Diego yesterday. It...
Differences Between xp_readerrolog and sp_readerrorlog: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
I was creating a question on sp_readerrorlog and realized that this procedure is different...
Why sys.fn_dblog Is Undocumented And Why It's Still There
By SQLPals
Why sys.fn_dblog Is Undocumented And Why It's Still There Why sys.fn_dblog...
Forums
Implementing Type 4 Slowly Changing Dimensions in SQL Server
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Implementing Type 4 Slowly Changing...
The Disabled Index
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Disabled Index
Server-Level Table sizes
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Server-Level Table sizes
Question of the Day
The Disabled Index
I run this code on SQL Server 2022.
CREATE TABLE Drink
(
drinkid INT NOT NULL
CONSTRAINT DrinkPK PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED,
drinkname VARCHAR(20),
rating NUMERIC(2, 1)
)
GO
INSERT INTO Drink
(
drinkid,
drinkname,
rating
)
VALUES
(1, 'Margarita', 4.5),
(2, 'Mojito', 4.3),
(3, 'Old Fashioned', 4.7),
(4, 'Martini', 4.4),
(5, 'Cosmopolitan', 4.2)
GO
ALTER INDEX drinkpk ON dbo.drink DISABLE
GO
SELECT * FROM dbo.Drink
GO
What is the result? See possible answers