What goes around comes around.  The person you help today may remember you when they get their next position.  There is a pleasure to be had when you hear...

In general, T-SQL just doesn't lend itself to code reuse. I've seen lots of attempts at using functions as a way to turn T-SQL into more of a development language....

I'd use CHARINDEX. You can search for an expression, as simple as looking for the space, within the string and return the value where that space is.

If you're just talking VMs on Azure, yeah. Same behaviors as VMs anywhere else. If you're talking Managed Instance or Azure SQL Database, different rules. Very.

Aggregation versus sorting. A lot less work to sort than aggregate. Also, a join operation versus none.

Also, you can get much more accurate measures if you use Extended Events.

Yeah, I'm a little surprised they don't have either Query Store or Extended Events working on it. Seems like a necessity. The DMVs are nice, but cache dependent, so it's...

3rd party solution (my employer), Redgate Software makes a tool, SQL Compare, that can actually look directly at the backup file and compare that to a database to find differences....

Source control your database code. All of it.

If you can't guarantee, 100%, that most (read that as 98% or more) of the queries will be able to filter on the partitioning column(s), then whatever you do, don't...

You want to look up the WITH MOVE syntax. You can restore to a new database name, but only if you also move the storage location for the database.

First things first, just so you know, despite the name, Profiler in Azure Data Studio isn't Profiler. It's a wrapper around Extended Events. You can expand and extend what gets...

And here's another area of trust that worries me.  I regularly reconcile all my financial accounts monthly.  Why?  Because they are all on computer systems that can cause errors. ...

What is it with double posts on this site? When I submitted my first post I got a 403 error and then when I refreshed the page I didn't...

Truly appreciate everyone's feedback on this one. I find it a fascinating topic. I like the various approaches we all take, based on a combination of our own experiences and...

Grant, and anyone else who may not be aware, the USPS offers Informed Delivery on their web site which provides pictures of most mail being delivered.  It's a simple...