Worst Practice - Not Qualifying Objects With The Owner
Regular columnist Chris Hedgate follow up on Andy's recent article about Worst Practices with one of his own. This is worth passing on to your development team.
Reporting Services!
Mike takes a good first look at Reporting Services. We're trying to add some coverage of this interesting new product. This gives a good overview from a real user perspective.
Generate Next Numbers with SQL Server
Dinesh ran into a situation where a client had very specific requirements for generating keys. Take a look at the solution, can you better alternatives? Sometimes you just can't talk the client into changing!
How to Make Sure You Have Good Passwords
As Robin points out there is no built in way to make sure users have strong passwords when using SQL authentication. There are a couple changes you can make (with appropriate warnings!) that will allow you to do this. Read on to find out why and how.
Monitoring Failed Job Steps
New Author! We've run a couple articles on similar topics, this one takes a slightly different approach. It's a short article and has two scripts included.
Microsoft Action Pack Subscription
One of the biggest hurdles people new to the IT field face is getting access to all the software they need so they can learn. This new program from Microsoft offers a TON of software for under $400. Caveats apply (don't they always?) but it's worth the 5 minutes to read what it takes.
Review of Lumigent Entegra
We've been trying to catch up on reviews lately, Hai was kind enough to give Entegra a try and report back on it. The basic concept is that it lets you do extensive auditing without having to add triggers. If you're trying to find an auditing solution, this is worth considering.
Regular Expression Library
This isn't a SQL site nor can you easily do regular expressions from SQL. That said, sometimes regular expressions are EXACTLY what you need to solve a problem. The downside? They're tricky! This is a great resource to pass on to your development team.
Typed Data Objects
This is a tool to generate C# code based on a sql script. Source code is also available for download. It's free! One caveat is that the site is in Italian.
Blogs
Stupid Things I Did With AI: ASCII Art
By Steve Jones
I ran across this article recently (https://www.gatesnotes.com/meet-bill/source-code/reader/microsoft-original-source-code) and it has a great opening piece...
Simple Talks Podcasting in 2026
By Steve Jones
I’m in the UK today, having arrived this morning in London. Hopefully, by this...
SSMS 22 still inserting tabs instead of spaces
I’m not trying to start up a debate whether you should use tabs or...
Forums
Cumulative Update 23 - KB5074819 - Database Mail - No longer working.
Hi there, Has anyone else had any trouble with Database Mail in Cumulative Update...
Script Task execution error with HTTP request
I have a script task that tries to execute a HTTP request, which seems...
SQL Server 2025 Standard Developer Edition
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server 2025 Standard Developer...
Question of the Day
URL Safe or Not?
If I use BASE4_ENCODE() in SQL Server 2025, is the output URL Safe by default?
See possible answers