Regular Audit Analysis
This Friday Steve Jones asks about how you handle audit data in your environment. Do you regularly analyze the data? Or do you wait for something to go wrong before you check the data.
Reporting Services: Adding extra columns / rows to a matrix
The functionality of additional columns / rows in a cross table ("matrix") in Reporting Services is limited to totals / subtotals. By using a stored function a solution is described.
Fast and Free; SQL Scripts Manager's Script Generator
When William produced his second article on the free tool 'SQL Scripts Manager', revealing that it worked just as well with PowerShell and Python scripts as it does with TSQL, he thought that would be the end of the series. Oh no; in response to feedback, comes a small add-in called 'Script Generator' that makes a big difference to the speed of developing and producing new scripts.
SSMS: The Query Window Keyboard Shortcuts
Simple-Talk's free wallchart of the most important SSMS keyboard shortcuts aims to help find all those curiously forgettable key combinations within SQL Server Management Studio that unlock the hidden magic that is available for editing and executing queries.
Raw Materials - Transportation Management
Transportation Management is an information technology problem in more ways than one.
The Age of Software
Does the age of software matter? Steve Jones talks about this after there was a decision for the SQL 11 tools not to support Windows XP.
XLSExport: A CLR procedure to export proc results to Excel
A CLR procedure utilizing the NPOI library to export the results of a passed stored procedure to an Excel spreadsheet.
Harnessing PowerShell's String Comparison and List-Filtering Features
When you are first learning PowerShell, it often seems to be an 'Alice through the looking-glass' world. Just the simple process of comparing and selecting strings can seem strangely obtuse. Michael turns the looking-glass into wonderland with his wall-chart of the PowerShell string-comparison operators and syntax
SSRS 2008 R2 KPIs with bullet graphs
Key Performance Indicators are typically displayed in a scorecard with stop light indicators, which are either red, amber or green light icons. The limitation for these kind of indicators is that you can see the actual and target values in two different fields as well as see the status of the KPI in red, amber or green color. If the user wants to figure out the thresholds associated with the KPI, these values are generally not visible. Further, representing the threshold values in the scorecard itself defeats the purpose of the scorecard. The scorecard should display the KPI's status in the most summarized form and use a minimal amount of space on the dashboard. In this tip we would look at how to address this issue.
Blogs
Narrow Task Decomposition in AI Pipeline Agents
A nightly load into sales_fact fails. Ask an orchestrating agent to break down the...
Car Update: August 2026
By Steve Jones
It’s been some time since I provided a car update, so I decided to...
Microsoft Fabric OneLake Shortcuts: When to Use Them and When Not To
By James Serra
An architecture scenario Imagine separate Sales, Finance, Shared Data, and Executive Analytics workspaces. Sales...
Forums
Searching for my own posts
I have a really stupid question... Is there an easy way to search for...
How to Work with On-Premises AI Models to Generate T-SQL Code
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How to Work with On-Premises...
Escaping Strings
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Escaping Strings
Question of the Day
Escaping Strings
The STRING_ESCAPE() function requires 2 parameters in SQL Server 2025. The first is a string of text and the second is the type of escape rules being used. What are the options for the second parameter?
See possible answers