You need a quiet couple of hours poking about with DMVs, and checking execution plans to get to the bottom of the a query issue, but you can't make a copy the production database either. It's too big, and the data is private....
When you are inserting, updating, or deleting records from a table, SQL Server keeps track of the records that are changed in two different pseudo tables: INSERTED, and DELETED. These tables are normally used in DML triggers. If you use the OUTPUT clause on an INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE or MERGE statement you can expose the records that go to these pseudo tables to your application and/or T-SQL code.
Should I be formatting dates on the database side? What tools can I use in SQL Server to format and parse dates? This article helps you decide which one best suits your needs.
This Friday Steve Jones asks about maintenance. Do you have regular windows? Flex time? Or is maintenance just added on whenever it is needed and added onto your work week.
SQL Server 2008 R2 brought several new features into the SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) arena. In the data visualization category, we now have three additional ways to display and visualize/analyze data in the reports.
This demo will show you the how powerfull is powershell. We will use cicles and the get-content command.
Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren as Steve Jones is on vacation. Today Andy talks about personality tests and what they might tell you about yourself.
From the previous AlwaysOn Availability Group article, we provided a name for the availability group listener which is simply a unique DNS name as a Virtual Network Name (VNN) to direct read-write requests to the primary replica and read-only requests to the read-only secondary replica.
This SSIS package performs multiple XSL transformations on an XML document, then shreds the transformed document and inserts its data into a SQL Server table.
Today Steve Jones talks about the pace of data growth looking to outpace the IT budget changes. As data professionals, we need to learn to do more with less.
By Steve Jones
While wandering around the documentation looking for some Question of the Day topics, I...
By Arun Sirpal
Third part in my Ai series with databases. When building AI solutions within the...
By Steve Jones
This month we have a very interesting invitation from Koen Verbeeck. He has hosted...
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As of June 2026, what is the best version of TLS to use with SQL Server?
See possible answers