SQLServerCentral Article

Help a Student

One of our community is working on a thesis for his graduate degree on the effects of outsourcing on knowledge transfer among software engineers. He's got an anonymous survey setup, so if you have a few minutes, lend a helping hand.

SQLServerCentral Article

Handling Zero Byte Files in DTS

SQL Server 2005 has substantially enhanced its ETL capabilities, but many people will still be working with DTS in SQL Server 2000 for many years. New author James Greaves brings us a technique for working with imports and handling files that might not have any data.

Technical Article

Healthcare Data Models Matter

Healthcare applications come and go, but data live on forever. We’ve seen that since the beginning of the computer industry; when we move from legacy systems into more “modern” architectures, we often leave behind applications, but we almost always take along the data into the future. Even though data are so important, we in health-IT don’t seem to spend the quality time necessary to structure our schemas and databases in such a way as to make it easier to maintain in the future. We often don’t design our data models solidly, and we don’t test them well by putting them through simulations or design them for multiple versions.

SQLServerCentral Article

Lookup Table Madness

Are you mad? Not angry, more like crazy when it comes to designing databases in SQL Server? Don Peterson has met a few people he thinks are just that when it comes to building lookup tables. Does it stem from poor understanding of database design? Or do you disagree? Read Don's case against this particular design practice.

Technical Article

Free SSIS Events and Code Camp

There are a few upcoming SQL\SSIS\Developer events coming up in the next week. Andy Warren and Brian Knight will be speaking at Code Camp in Orlando (a free full day event) and Brian will be doing a SSIS event in Philadelphia. For more information, see this blog post.

Blogs

Shifting Mindsets: Why FinOps is Essential for Cloud Efficiency

By

As a DevOps practitioner, I’ve always focused on performance, scalability, and automation. But as...

March 2026 SQL Server Security Updates

By

On Patch Tuesday, in addition to OS and Office security patches, Microsoft also released...

How Fabric Mirroring Transformed with SQL Server 2025

By

When mirroring was first released for Azure SQL Database, it used Change Data Capture...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

Multiple Deployment Processes

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Multiple Deployment Processes

How to Use sqlpackage to Detect Schema Drift Between Azure SQL Databases

By Kunal Rathi

Comments posted to this topic are about the item How to Use sqlpackage to...

Upgrading Admin Queries

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Upgrading Admin Queries

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

Upgrading Admin Queries

I have a query from a former DBA that we run on SQL Server 2025 to check on database metadata. This query references sys.sysaltfiles. I want to refactor this code to be more modern. Which DMV should I reference instead?  

See possible answers