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.
How to Use the New PRODUCT() Function in SQL Server 2025
Introduced in SQL Server 2025 CTP 1.3, the PRODUCT() function acts similarly to SUM(), but multiplies values rather than adds them. It is an aggregate function in SQL Server and therefore operates on a data set, rather than on scalar values.
Guidelines and Requirements
We have some requirements that we meet a particular setting or value, but often we have guidelines and recommendations. Do you know the difference?
Workspace Identity Authentication for your Power BI Semantic Models in Microsoft Fabric
This article shows how you can easily create connections in your Power BI workspace that use Identity Authentication to connect to your data.
SQL Server Triggers for Business Rules Automation
The advantage of using triggers is that the same processing can occur regardless of where or how the data has been inserted, updated or deleted. In this article, we look at several examples of where and why triggers could be useful along with an example use case.
Blogs
Blog a Day – Day 1: History of AI
By Vinay Thakur
it has been a year since i have not written much on the blog...
A New Word: on tenderhooks
By Steve Jones
on tenderhooks – adj. feeling the primal satisfaction of being needed by someone, which...
Ramblings about data communities and your contributions, no excuses
By DataOnWheels
I have been active in the data community throughout my career. I have met...
Forums
A Quick Restore
Comments posted to this topic are about the item A Quick Restore
Guarding Against SQL Injection at the Database Layer (SQL Server)
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Guarding Against SQL Injection at...
Ola Hallengren Index Optimize Maintenance can we have data compression = page
I have a quick question on Ola Hallengren Index Optimize Maintenance . Do we...
Question of the Day
A Quick Restore
While doing some testing of an application, I wanted to reset my environment after doing some testing with this code:
USE DNRTest BACKUP DATABASE DNRTest TO DISK = 'dnrtest.bak' GO /* Bunch of stuff tested here */RESTORE DATABASE DNRTest FROM DISK = 'dnrtest.bak' WITH REPLACEWhat happens if this runs, assuming the "bunch of stuff" isn't anything affecting the instance. See possible answers