Query Exercise: Improving Cardinality Estimation
Your challenge for this week is to tune a query. Say Stack Overflow has a dashboard that shows the top-ranking users in their most popular location. It’s even got an index to support it
Attention SQLBits 2024 Attendees!
Microsoft will be featured at SQL Bits with a keynote speaker, a full day of training and a few other sessions. Register today for the conference in March and we hope to see you there.
Stairway to Biml Level 6 - Programming with Metadata
In this next level of the Stairway to Biml, learn how metadata makes your Biml code more efficient and helpful in generating packages.
This is Why You Use Git for Scripts
Git is a good tool for DBAs and other Operations staff. Today Steve gives you a few reasons why.
Scientific Calculations in Power BI - Cube, Square, Logarithms, Powers, Inverse and more
Microsoft Power BI Desktop provides users with multiple ways to help shape and transform their data. One of the options users have is scientific calculations, which support operations like cube, square, logarithms, etc. Power BI has this option in the Power Query Editor mode, where the user can easily apply one of these transformations for any number-based columns. In this tip, we will overview this utility in Power BI and how to benefit from it.
Un-Stable Teams
At Redgate, the teams change every year and Steve has a few reasons why this is good.
Writing SQL Server code with AI using GitHub Copilot
Introduction In this article, we will see how to work with GitHub Copilot. GitHub copilot is an interesting plug-in that generates code using AI. The technology is from Microsoft and OpenAI. We will show how to install Copilot, and how to generate SQL Server code (T-SQL) using Copilot. First, we will answer some FAQs about Copilot […]
Planning a Database Testing Strategy for Flyway
With Flyway, you can adopt a test-driven development strategy that will allow you to test and evaluate databases, and database objects, at every phase of the database development lifecycle. The further down the delivery pipeline that bugs appear, the more costly in time and resources they are to fix. This approach will allow you to catch many of them before the database change even gets committed to version control, making a continuous delivery process much easier to adopt and sustain.
The Birth of Computing Was the Birth of Testing
Last year I had the most wonderful opportunity. I took part in Data Relay, an event in the UK which tours several cities. Wonderful time, but not the focus here. The very first one was held at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. Without a doubt, you've heard of Alan Turing, Enigma, and […]
Do You Have a Jeff?
Today Steve wonders if you have a go-to person at work or maybe if you are that person. Or if that is even a good thing in a company. It might be better if there were more tools available to help others.
Blogs
Shifting Mindsets: Why FinOps is Essential for Cloud Efficiency
By HeyMo0sh
As a DevOps practitioner, I’ve always focused on performance, scalability, and automation. But as...
March 2026 SQL Server Security Updates
By Brian Kelley
On Patch Tuesday, in addition to OS and Office security patches, Microsoft also released...
How Fabric Mirroring Transformed with SQL Server 2025
When mirroring was first released for Azure SQL Database, it used Change Data Capture...
Forums
Multiple Deployment Processes
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How to Use sqlpackage to Detect Schema Drift Between Azure SQL Databases
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How to Use sqlpackage to...
Upgrading Admin Queries
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Upgrading Admin Queries
Question of the Day
Upgrading Admin Queries
I have a query from a former DBA that we run on SQL Server 2025 to check on database metadata. This query references sys.sysaltfiles. I want to refactor this code to be more modern. Which DMV should I reference instead?
See possible answers