Assigning useful names to unique keys, foreign keys, and check constraints (rather than simply retaining the GUI assigned default) is important, because these things appear in error messages.

I've found that most dilemmas we face in life are of the false variety. Most of us don't have to choose between either accepting our current situation at work or...

Maybe Microsoft is wanting to following the casino business model where free food and drinks (tools and source code) are used to draw crowds who will end up renting rooms...

First, aggressively pushing table and index changes are something that's typically done during the prototyping and development stage. If you're doing this post-production, then that indicates poor planning.
Secondly, many...

Since we build our software on the data, we need to ensure we are properly capture the data in a way doesn't create too much technical debt. There are...

.. The goal is to have a single truth for each datapoint, if we can achieve that then we can make decisions about whether to copy that data somewhere...

What we use is a combination of sql traces, pings, event logs, application APIs, and for some web applications: parsing http responses. All of it duct taped together with PowerShell...

If your organization is like mine and includes TB scale tables, dozens of developers coding SQL, and hundreds of end users, then adding a new index should definitely be something...

First we must understand what is the external function of a "primary" key (versus an alternate key or candidate key). Once you understand a primary key's external role in relation...

When we speak of T-SQL "heresies", it seems we're speaking of anti-patterns. Some things developers do (like inline sub-queries, scalar functions, and SELECT *) greatly simplify the code and may...

On-prem virtualization and cloud hosting makes it easy to spin up new instances, but on the downside it can also lead to a sprawling ghetto of quickly prototyped databases that...

The primary database I work with could be best described as an operational data store; containing time versioned copies of tables from multiple OLTP data sources. There are high volume...