Good gosh, that's not a short list. You have DISTINCT and TOP in the SELECT list. ON in the JOIN criteria, plus APPLY, PIVOT and UNPIVOT. WHERE of course including...

You'll need to explain that in detail to my knees. Ha!

However, yeah, total agreement.

To understand what's happening, I'd suggest capturing some metrics.

First, query performance metrics. You're posting in the SQL Server 2012 forum. Assuming that's what you're running, the best tool for the...

Here is a little challenge.

Look back at 10, 15 years of new feature in or around SQL Server you've learned or heard about.

What share of those features did...

Yeah, and there are also a ton of checks built into DBATools. So that might be worth looking at. There are also 3rd party solutions. For example, my company,...

A quick note on why creating a clustered index first and then loading the data is usually the best approach (testing is always your best friend). The clustered index defines...

The recovery process can be extremely long, especially if there were long running transactions that it has to clean up. It's not unheard of for recover to take 2-3 or...

Generally, I use a combination of Active Directory groups (assuming Windows), and roles to define security.

As shown above, you can grant specific actions to a role. So, do that. Least...

So, I really love Policy Based Management. However, you need to know, Microsoft doesn't share my feelings. They have given that technology almost zero attention since it was originally released....

MSDN is the only way I know to have a renewable set of time in Azure for less cost. You can get a free trial, but it runs out and...

There may be a million details on this, but I'd start with two general concepts.

For emptying the table in order to reload it, TRUNCATE is your best bet. There are...

One thing I would strongly suggest for your career, don't get hung up on labels or titles. I was working as a database developer, and by that I mean, designing,...

For learning Synapse, also look up Azure Data Warehouse. That's the old name. So there's a lot more documentation there. I have a few blog posts. I used to teach...

Synapse is really cool, and worth your time. It also doesn't change that much at the core. At the edges though, hoo boy.

I've been working with Azure for over 10 years now (and I've added AWS in the last year, along with some other stuff). Fact is, it's hard. Take Azure SQL...