Configure SQL Server Alerts for Azure SQL Managed Instance
How can we setup alerts in Azure SQL MI to notify us when there are issues?
The Yutes
I recently had the opportunity to talk a little PostgreSQL with the Salt Lake City PostgreSQL Meetup group (thank you for having me by the way). Great bunch of people who were really engaged and asked a lot of questions. On the way out of the event, I was chatting with one person (who had […]
Revisiting SQL Server Window Functions- A Practical Walkthrough
A look at window functions in SQL and how they can be used to query data without the restrictions of a GROUP BY.
The Security of Old Tech
Older technology can introduce security issues, along with performance ones. Keeping your systems somewhat up to date is important for security.
How to Increase SQL Server Column Width Without IO (Input/Output) Overhead
This article dives into a fun (and interesting!) strategy for widening fixed-width columns in SQL Server, to reduce downtime, risk, and runtime at the time when a column’s data type needs to be changed.
Password Guidance
Passwords are essential and also a problem in many organizations. Guidance has changed over the years and Steve has a few thoughts on what's recommended today.
Stairway to Transaction Log Management in SQL Server, Level 9: Monitoring the Transaction Log
Our major goal in terms of log maintenance for all databases under our care is to optimize for write performance, in order to support all activities that require SQL Server to write to the log, including data modifications, data loads, index rebuilds, and so on. However, it's also important to keep an eye on possible log fragmentation, which, as described previously, can affect the performance of processes that need to read the log, such as log backups and the crash recovery process.
A Rolling Filtered Index in SQL Server
I recently resolved an issue where a query pulling data from the last 30 days would time out due to the table’s size and the lack of a supporting index. Creating a supporting index is possible, but not ideal; it will be very large and may not be useful for most queries and use cases. I wonder how I could implement a filtered index that follows time and is always limited to the last n days.
Requiring Technical Debt Payments
Steve found someone using an interesting approach to get developers to address some technical debt.
Using the FP-Growth Algorithm to Mine Useful Patterns in Data
This article looks at using the FP-Growth algorithm from Python to mine data in SQL Server.
Blogs
SQL Server Journey till 2025 (brief)
By Vinay Thakur
Quick Summary for Microsoft SQL Server till 2025, I am fortunate to be part...
Building Power BI Reports: Desktop vs Fabric
By James Serra
Why this comparison feels confusing If you’re a Power BI report author who’s just...
Identity Columns Can’t Be Updated: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
I’m not sure I knew identity column values could not be updated. I ran...
Forums
Can someone please explain what happens?
I have mentioned this several times over several years. Can someone please help me...
SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT) returns null when nothing is found instead of 0
SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT Component) AS Found FROM tblComponents WHERE(Component NOT LIKE '%[a-z]%') AND(LTRIM(RTRIM(Component)) = 'GM13622')...
Remotely Engineer Fabric Lakehouse objects: The Fabric Modern Data Platform
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Remotely Engineer Fabric Lakehouse objects:...
Question of the Day
Creating JSON III
In a SQL Server 2025 table, called Beer, I have this data:
BeerIDBeerName 1Becks 2Fat Tire 3Mac n Jacks 4Alaskan Amber 8KirinI run this code:
SELECT JSON_OBJECTAGG(
BeerID: BeerName )
FROM beer;
What are the results? See possible answers