Jeff, you want CI to be fast, because you want to get feedback quickly. This runs constantly, so it needs to be fast.

This IS NOT THE ONLY TESTING done with...

That was precisely my thought.  A fellow DBA in another company recently went through a bout with a ransom-ware.  The ransom-ware was able to track down where the normal...

I'll have to look. It's more a...

Can the three winners email me and give me the place they'd like an Amazon GC sent? Whichever email you'd like me to use.

I'm not sure what you mean by pull. Do you mean copy the backup file? SQL backups from from the instance and are written to files. If you are looking...

There is fn_listextendedproperty - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/system-functions/sys-fn-listextendedproperty-transact-sql?view=sql-server-ver15

Good luck with that. Not sure third party tools make this better, but you're welcome to eval SQL Backup from Redgate if it might help

If you don't have sensitive data in production, that does make things easier, but as data sets grow, there is a lack of agility in dev environments if you are...

You can't store binary data in an int column. If you hacked the db, you'd  have 4 bytes, but whatever you put in there would be interpreted as a number.

AE...

The underlying storage is binary. If you don't have the certificate on your machine, the result set will contain binary data inside of the that result set for those encrypted...

That's just the internal implementation of AE. The idea here is to not have to change your app, which might be expecting an int. I believe the metadata knows this...

People often confuse the window and analytical functions, which is what I would have asked. Often the code might need to be pre-2012, so using the OVER() with windowing functions...

Apologies. That is poor verbiage. I want to omit these from the result set. I'll change that.

DevOps doesn't remove the need for QA functions. It might say that we blend that into the development team, but there is still the need for testing. Most DevOps shops...

No need to apologize, but the "up to date" doesn't fix this. You need a trace flag, which is part of what you would need to know. This isn't fixed,...