2004 Readers Choice Awards Results
SQLServerCentral.com wrapped up two weeks of voting by the community on the best third party products to help you with your SQL Servers. Read on to see who won.
All About Transactions - Part 2
Transactions in SQL Server can be very complicated, and are often misunderstood. Don Peterson brings us part 2 of his series on transactions. This part deals with XACT_ABORT, compilation errors and error handling in transactions.
Building a 24 x 7 Database
Over the last few years, corporations have invested billions of dollars to integrate the automations of core business systems in large ERP applications. This paper looks at the risk of downtime and solutions for building an around-the-clock database.
Beta Developers Wanted
Mattias Fagerlund, a longtime author and contributor here is developing a new product to help developers migrate between versions of their databases. He's searching for a few Beta developers to assist.
SQL MAIL Using POP3 and SMTP
SQL Server has a great build in messaging system with SQLMail. Unfortunately it requires Outlook and Exchange to work properly. Some people don't like this or do not run Exchange and have issues getting it to work. Gregory Larsen takes a look at how you can use SMTP to send email from SQL Server.
Updating Data in Linked Servers, Information Schema Views, and More
E
very day a developer somewhere needs to write code to iterate through SQL Server™ system objects, query and update tables in linked servers, handle optimistic concurrency, and retrieve column and stored procedure metadata. In this month's column, I will address these and other T-SQL development scenarios based on some of the questions I most frequently receive from readers.
Two Minute SQL Server Stumpers
How prepared are you for your next interview? How prepared are you to give one? SQLServerCentral.com has compiled a number of questions from our ever popular Question of the Day into a book. Read about the project and show your support today by picking up a copy.
Writing Secure Transact-SQL
There are plenty of good sources of information about how to deploy SQL Server in a secure fashion. However, these resources are often targeted at database administrators tasked with securing already developed applications. In addition, there is a rich body of information that discusses writing secure .NET and ASP.NET code, including .NET code that accesses SQL Server. However, many of these resources focus on the data access code that runs on the application servers rather than the Transact-SQL (T-SQL) code that executes within SQL Server. Developing T-SQL code that runs securely on SQL Server is the primary focus of this column.
Bowling Challenge - The Results
Andy started a contest this summer to see who could develop a T-SQL method of keeping a bowling score. He's finally gotten around to the results after the damage from the hurricanes was cleaned up. See who won and see the code that does the trick.
Stored Procedures and Caching
One of the biggest performance gains built into SQL Server is the stored procedure. In this article by Brian Kelley, he shows you how to fully utilize, debug and monitor the caching of such objects.
Blogs
Shifting Mindsets: Why FinOps is Essential for Cloud Efficiency
By HeyMo0sh
As a DevOps practitioner, I’ve always focused on performance, scalability, and automation. But as...
March 2026 SQL Server Security Updates
By Brian Kelley
On Patch Tuesday, in addition to OS and Office security patches, Microsoft also released...
How Fabric Mirroring Transformed with SQL Server 2025
When mirroring was first released for Azure SQL Database, it used Change Data Capture...
Forums
Multiple Deployment Processes
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How to Use sqlpackage to Detect Schema Drift Between Azure SQL Databases
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How to Use sqlpackage to...
Upgrading Admin Queries
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Upgrading Admin Queries
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