Technical Article

A True SQL OS

SQL Server is so large and complex that it's like an operating system. In fact, there the core engine is often referred to as the "SQL OS" by Microsoft developers. Steve Jones would like to see SQL Server as it's own OS at some point.

Technical Article

The Ghost in the Machine

Now that hierarchical data structures are popular again because of XML, their full hierarchical processing is still being limited to flat two dimensional linear path processing by relational processing. This will change when database professionals realize that ANSI SQL relational processing can now support full multipath nonlinear hierarchical processing.

External Article

Validate SQL Server Backups Exist with Policy Based Management

I recently submitted a tip regarding the existence of your backup files using the undocumented system stored procedure xp_fileexist. But how would you go about executing that script against all your SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 instances? I took that script and decided to go one step further using Policy Based Management to create a custom policy that you can then run against all your SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 instances.

Blogs

Learn about Modern Microsoft Apps in San Diego

By

I wrote about learning today for the editorial: I Can’t Make You Learn. I...

How To Deploy Fabric SQL and Azure SQL Databases with Azure DevOps

By

Fabric has CI/CD built in, but if you've tried to use it for database...

A New Word: Attriage

By

attriage – n. the state of having lost all control over how you feel...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

SSRS Reminded Me of the Time Microsoft Retired TMG

By Marko Coha

Comments posted to this topic are about the item SSRS Reminded Me of the...

Getting results from a Procedure to join to a query

By bswhipp

I have a need to execute a stored procedure and return the results to...

Upgrade 2016 Standard to 2022 Express

By pdanes

Title pretty much says it all - can this be done? I've tried several...

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

BIT_COUNT II

In SQL Server 2025, I have a table (dbo.UserPermission) that contains this data:

UserID  UserPermissions
15
23
37
4       NULL
What is returned when I run this code:
select bit_count(UserPermissions) as PermissionCount
from dbo.UserPermission
where UserID = 4;

See possible answers