If you have SQL Compare, then the SQL Snapper utility is very valuable 'extra' for certain team activities, because it can be freely distributed. It means that any developer can create a SQL Compare snapshot from databases that are on their local workstation and store them on the network.
2021-01-22
This article explains ten ways that SQL Monitor tackles the problem of scaling out the coverage of a single, lightweight monitoring system, and so allows your teams to maintain the health and performance of larger collections of databases and higher numbers of monitored SQL servers.
2021-01-19
SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare can be used together, from the command line, to provide a complete build process, or to script out changes to both the database and its development data. For doing this routinely, I find it easiest to script the operation using PowerShell.
2021-01-15
Phil Factor takes a staged approach to generating development data, creating one project that simply copies data from an existing database, another that copies most data but generates any personal or sensitive data, and a third that starts from 'anonymized' data and then generates other columns entirely and increase the number of rows for testing.
2021-01-14
Phil Factor takes a strategic look at common SQL data masking techniques, and the challenges inherent in masking certain types of sensitive and personal data, while ensuring that it still looks like the real data, and retains its referential integrity, and distribution characteristics.
2021-01-11
Have you ever had to demonstrate a database-driven application, and longed to have the real data to do so? To do what, precisely? Well, so you can then scroll through the customers who have used the system, demonstrate the accounting and audit, browse through the products, maybe even demo the customer tracking system with comments, complaints and so on. All this is possible, using realistic, fake data.
2021-01-08
Phil Factor explores a lesser-known capability of SQL Compare, which is to help you maintain a 'traditional', well-documented, single file build script, for creating the current version of the database during development.
2021-01-06
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2021-01-05
Israel Valverde explains the triple benefits of extending SQL Monitor to cover your SQL Server instances running on Amazon RDS, in terms of SQL Server performance optimization, controlling AWS-hosting costs, and in having a single, unified view of the health of all your SQL Servers, regardless of where they are hosted.
2020-12-28
Cross-server references keep cropping up as a problem for development and build. Phil Factor demonstrates how using linked server 'aliases' can get around these issues, even if the individual databases use four-part references within the code rather than synonyms.
2020-12-24
Materialized lake views (MLVs) in Microsoft Fabric are an effective way to implement medallion...
By Steve Jones
I don’t have SQL Server installed on my laptop. In an effort to keep...
Using PowerBI Version1.25.9508.3237(January 2026). Installed Microsoft Power BI Desktop (Optimized for Power BI Report...
Hi all Can I get some perspective from the community please on performing in-place...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How Long is a Long...
In SQL Server 2025, a long I/O is recorded in the error log with message 833. How long much an I/O request be outstanding before this message is written to the log?
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