Cloud Outages
It seems that we regularly hear about outages from various cloud services. Steve Jones comments that we are likely to have this happen more and more, but it's shouldn't happen at a rate greater than in house IT services.
TSQL Challenge 58 - Playing Chess in TSQL – Part 1
Your job is to read the input string and generate a result set that represents the position of pieces in a chess board.
What's holding you back?
If you’re not where you want to be in your career, then what do you think is holding you back?
Creating a Reporting Services Histogram Chart for Statistical Distribution Analysis
Typically transactional data is quite detailed and analyzing an entire dataset on a graph is not feasible. Generally such data is analyzed using some form of aggregation or frequency distribution. One of the specialized charts generally used in Reporting Services for statistical distribution is Histogram Charts. In this tip we look at how Histogram Charts can be used for statistical distribution analysis and how to create and configure this type of chart in SSRS.
Index Management
This article demonstrates an Index Management strategy to tackle day to day performance issues due to improper indexes.
The Desire for Control
This Friday Steve Jones asks you if you want more knobs for SQL Server or less? It's a debate that balances the need for the DBA to know more with the resources Microsoft spends to build better tuning into the product.
3 SQL Join Concepts to Help You Choose the Right Join
What do SQL joins and the "teach a man to fish" Chinese proverb have in common? SQL joins, like regular expressions, are one of those commonplace programming tasks in which true success is entirely dependent upon your ability to conceptualize the outcome. Fail to do so and you'll likely wind up spending a few hours in a frustrating round of trial and error. Like regular expressions, the proliferation of online examples has actually contributed to the frustration, providing the equivalent of a day's worth of fish rather than the proverbial fishing pool.
Setting up linked servers with an out-of-process OLEDB provider
There is an inprocess setting for linked servers. Have you ever used it? Gianluca Sartori gives a look at what the implications are for this.
Support for 15,000 Partitions in SQL Server 2008 SP2 and SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1
In SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2, the number of partitions on tables and indexes is limited to 1,000. This paper discusses how SQL Server 2008 SP2 and SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 address this limitation by providing an option to increase the limit to 15,000 partitions. It describes how support for 15,000 partitions can be enabled and disabled on a database. It also talks about performance characteristics, certain limitations associated with this support, known issues, and their workarounds. This support is targeted to enterprise customers and ISVs with large-scale decision support or data warehouse requirements.
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?
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