Building a Better Profile
Steve thinks building a brand is important in today's competitive world of job seekers.
Shrink Database Log Files One by One
Learn how you can shrink your transaction log files serially, one by one.
Snowflake Temporary Tables vs. Transient Tables
When working with Snowflake, it is important to understand the different types of tables available and when to use each one. In this tutorial, we will compare Snowflake temporary and transient tables, highlight their similarities and differences, and provide examples of when to use each type of table.
Being Responsible for Data
There is an interesting court case on who is responsible for the data being posted on the Internet. Steve has a few thoughts today.
Piping, Filtering and Using Flyway Output in PowerShell
Flyway's output is often overwhelmed with verbose messages, most of which we can ignore but some of which provide vital warnings about failed compilations, or useful details about what a migration or callback did. I'll show how to use some pipeline-aware PowerShell functions to filter out and save the bits we want and pass the results along in a form that is useful to the next process in the pipeline.
Using TOP clause in a SELECT statement
There might be a time when you might want to return just a few rows of a result set, instead of the complete set. This might be useful if you want to just validate a selection criteria or a few rows of data. For whatever the reason the TOP clause can be used to return a specific number or a percentage of rows from a result set. This article will cover using the TOP clause in a SELECT statement and how it can be used to return a partial set of records.
Passing parameters to query without TVFs
This article looks at an interesting way to help your users get filtered data from a TVF instead of using a stored procedure or specialized view.
Database Monitoring: The ROI of Build vs. Buy
In this webinar, Microsoft Data Platform MVP, Grant Fritchey, is joined by our expert panel to share the pros and cons to building a monitoring system versus purchasing one.
How to use the SQL WHERE Clause with Examples
With the SQL WHERE clause in SQL Server, users can filter their query results in many ways. In most cases, we do not utilize all the options the WHERE clause provides, so we tend to forget that they exist. In this SQL tutorial, we will look at several examples of how to use the WHERE clause.
Blogs
Who Are You Doing It For?
By Brian Kelley
But as I've matured over the years, I came to realize that I needed...
Presenting Twice in May 2026
By alevyinroc
I will be presenting my latest session, Documenting Your Work for Worry-Free Vacations, in-person...
Finding the Next Sequence Value: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
I saw a question asking about the next sequence value and decided to try...
Forums
DB Design Methods
I've read a few posts regarding what we use to design DB models and...
Auto Update Statistics not triggering on filtered indexes
I've got a table with 186,703,969 rows, about 300GB of data. There are several...
What is the difference between SQL Server and SQL Database?
I created a SQL Database in Azure Portal but I've just noticed it also...
Question of the Day
An Unusual Identity
What values are returned when I run this code?
CREATE TABLE dbo.IdentityTest2
(
id NUMERIC(10,0) IDENTITY(10,10) PRIMARY KEY,
somevalue VARCHAR(20)
)
GO
INSERT dbo.IdentityTest2
(
somevalue
)
VALUES
( 'Steve')
, ('Bill')
GO
SELECT top 10
id
FROM dbo.IdentityTest2 See possible answers