SQL Server Monitoring Using Free Tools
You can do essential monitoring of SQL Server instances and databases with a FREE toolkit!
Install SQL Server and Oracle using PowerShell and Windows Containers
In this article we look at how to install SQL Server and Oracle using PowerShell to create development environments using Windows Containers.
Defining DevOps
Many people ask about DevOps and what it entails. Steve has a few thoughts on the challenges of adopting DevOps in a company.
How to Integrate Azure DevOps with Azure Synapse Studio
Learn how to connect your Synapse workspace to a Git repository.
Crowdsourcing quality: Can the hive mind/herd mentality help you in software testing?
Crowdsourcing is one way to get a job done. In this article, Devyani Borade describes crowdsourcing quality testing of software.
Testing a Flyway Database Migration
Often, we want to test the new version of a database, produced by a Flyway migration, before committing the new migration file, or to test the same migration run on a number of different databases. This article demonstrates how to do it, by generating and using JSON parameter files to run a series of Flyway actions on any number of databases, on any number of servers.
Knowing When to Respond
I ran into this quote on the Microsoft Learn site, which I thought was a great way to think about how to administer a system: "Without a baseline, every issue encountered could be considered normal and therefore not require any additional intervention." When I've had users file tickets or complain about things not working well, […]
Working with Fail Activity in Azure Data Factory
Introduction In this article, we will talk about a newly introduced activity in Azure Data Factory, which is the fail activity. The fail activity is very useful to stop or fail the pipeline at the specified point. For example, a lookup activity might return no data or a switch activity executes the default block. We […]
Exploring the Flyway Schema History Table
Flyway uses a schema history table to track the version of each database, recording in it every versioned migration file applied to build that version. It's worth understanding exactly how Flyway uses this table, the possible dangers of moving it to a non-default location and how to do it safely, if required.
How to replace an identity column with a sequence number
SQL Server provides two ways to include an incrementing number in a table. Greg Larsen explains how to replace an identity column with a sequence number.
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?
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