We're pleased to announce that Robert will be writing for us each month - generally on stored procedures, but occasionally on a different topic. This article discusses how nesting stored procedures works and how to use @@NextLevel. Good reading! If there is a stored procedure topic you'd like to see covered, add a comment to the article or email us at articles@sqlservercentral.com
Robyn Page and Phil Factor take on GROUP BY queries in SQL server, starting on the nursery slopes but finishing with a wild ride off-piste.
Maintenance Plan Designer gives you access to 11 tasks, which allow you to perform a variety of database management activities. This article provides a brief overview of each of them, focusing on their recent improvements.
Sql Server comes with a host of built in functions such as ISNULL, CONVERT and CAST. Now if that wasn't enough rope to hang ourselves with, as of Sql Server 2000 we gained the ability to create our own user defined functions. In this article I will be looking at the three main date functions DATEADD, DATEPART and DATEDIFF (there is a fourth called DATENAME but I want to get to the end of this article before you fall asleep so I decided to leave it for another date and time! And no it doesn't foretell the name of your future blind date so it's not as interesting as it sounds anyway) Then I will be combining all three in a user defined function of our own by which time our necks will be well and truly stretched
An updated version of xp_sql2exchange is now available, enabling you to publish SQL Server data easily to an exchange server. Read about this very cool extended stored procedure from author Steve Boriotti.
Michael M. David returns to SQLSummit.com to explore two approaches to XML hierarchical structure transformations. He explains the difference between restructuring and reshaping XML data, with the latter driven by the semantics of the data structure.
Phil Factor's describes his first encounter with the "light arms" (low calibre, small bore, needed to be fired).
Steve Jones is in Seattle for the first Microsoft BI Conference and offers some thoughts on the event.
his article will explore various methods of accessing SQL Server from inside Microsoft Expression Web. Microsoft Expression Web is a graphical development tool for creating web pages and is part of the new Expression Studio.
The .NET Framework 2.0 introduces a very handy new class in the System.Data.SqlClient namespace called SqlBulkCopy that makes it very easy and efficient to copy large amounts of data from your .NET applications to a SQL Server database. You can even use this class to write a short .NET application that can serve as a "middleman" to move data between database servers.
By Brian Kelley
Yesterday, July 27, 2026, Microsoft announced a new cybersecurity effort called Project Perception. Included...
By Steve Jones
If you’ve wanted a SQL Server MCP server for your databases, it’s available. The...
Introducing azsql-migration-test, a small open-source CLI that validates your Azure SQL Database migrations against...
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If I run this statement in SQL Server 2025, how is the password encrypted?
CREATE SYMMETRIC KEY MySymmetricKey WITH ALGORITHM = AES_256, KEY_SOURCE = 'My secret key source passphrase', IDENTITY_VALUE = 'My secret identity value' ENCRYPTION BY PASSWORD = 'S&perS#cretP@ssword7'; GOSee possible answers