Indexes: When Column Selectivity Is Not Always A Requirement

While preparing for my SQL Saturday Salt Lake City presentation, Climbing the B-Tree, I ran into one of the “word of mouth” facts that the first column of an index should be highly selective, i.e., it should only point to one or a few rows. This is not always the case and I’ll show you […]

No Time for Testing

Testing software is important, but we always seem to find reasons not to. Steve Jones has a few thoughts about testing.

Should You Use SQL Server 2022’s STRING_SPLIT?

SQL Server 2022 improved the STRING_SPLIT function so that it can now return lists that are guaranteed to be in order. However, that’s the only thing they improved – there’s still a critical performance problem with it.

The Importance of a Good Data Model in Power BI Desktop

A New Year, New Efforts

Happy New Year! You're going to be seeing a lot of summaries for 2022 and predictions for 2023 around this time of year. I'm not writing one of those. You'll also see people calling for new years resolutions and the like. I'm not going for that either. Nope, let's keep it simple. It is a […]

Looking Back at 2022

This is the last workday of 2022. Next week starts a new year, and as I've often done, I wanted to look back at the year. This time I decided to look back month by month, at some of the headlines and memorable data-related topics. I'm tackling things month-by-month. In January there was a set […]

T-SQL Language Changes in SQL Server 2022 Part 3

Learn about more of the T-SQL language changes in SQL Server 2022. This article is the third in a series and will cover the changes to the JSON functions.

Enabling digital transformation – and data modernization – with DevOp

Where does data fit into the digital transformation story? Discover how and why it deserves a place in this fascinating piece from Pramod Sadalage, principal consultant at Thought Works

Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) support for Azure Blob Storage

In this article, we walk through the steps and examples of how to use Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) when working in Azure.

Stairway to SQL Server Replication: Level 2 - The Role of the Distributor

In this Stairway, Sebastian will be covering the details of SQL Server transactional and merge replication, from understanding the basic terminology and methodology of setting up replication, to describing how it works and how the basic replication processes can be monitored.