Impact Minutes
When downtime strikes, we may have to make decisions about which systems to focus our efforts upon. Steve talks about the impact of a disaster on your choices.
Finding Inactive SQL Server Databases
Phil Factor demonstrates how to use Extended Events to detect acquisition of Intent locks, and so determine which databases are active or apparently 'dormant', and then on which tables data has been modified recently, or which views and stored procedures have been run.
Power BI Theme Generator New Methods and Customizations
New methods and usage for themes were recently introduced for Power BI and in this article we cover how you can use these and customize them for Power BI.
Building SQL Memorial - Getting Started
Introduction One of the projects I've been wanting to tackle for some time is putting up a memorial for those people that our community has lost. I talked about it when Dwain Camps passed, and I kicked myself for not having something available when Tom Roush passed. Recently Gareth Swanepoel suddenly left us after COVID-19 […]
Remembering the Past
We had unfortunately lost quite a few members of our SQL Family. We have a new way to remember them.
SQL Server interview questions for experienced developers
SQL Server tech interview questions must be well crafted to make sure the candidate actually knows the topic. In this article, Sergey Gigoyan provides his favorite questions for interviewing SQL Server developers.
Getting started with the SQL MERGE statement
This article is focused on beginners who have already started writing SQL queries and are now diving deep towards more data processing and complex queries in SQL. When we talk about data processing, an important concept that comes to our mind is performing ETL workloads to a data warehouse. ETL is a very complex topic […]
Live versus Stored Data
Is it always important to have the most current data? Steve notes that you might need to make a decision here.
Create SQL Server Graphics with ggplot2 and R Services
Learn how to create charts and graphs with R and how you can use R code in SSMS to generate and save graphs to an external file.
Is Tempdb Causing a Bottleneck?
One of your SQL Server instance shows a major dip in performance or throughput, affecting all the user databases. You notice that the slow interludes coincide, as if orchestrated. On investigation, it appears that several transactions running over that period were using a lot of space in tempdb. However, which of them, if any, are causing the tempdb bottleneck, and why?
Blogs
Methodology for dealing with bad data in production
By Brian Kelley
Pinal Dave wrote up his methodology for what to do when you discover bad...
How to Provision an Azure SQL Database
Aside from spinning up a SQL Server instance container, the free Azure SQL Database...
Claude finds two cryptographic weaknesses (but the sky isn’t falling)
By Brian Kelley
If you haven't seen the announcement, Anthropic was able to utilize Claude (Mythos Preview)...
Forums
Fixing P1 Queries
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Fixing P1 Queries
Symmetric Key Encryption
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Symmetric Key Encryption
The “Successful Login” Dilemma: Why Your Login Auditing Strategy Might Be Hurting Your Server
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The “Successful Login” Dilemma: Why...
Question of the Day
BIT_COUNT() IV
In SQL Server 2025, I run this code:
select bit_count('A')
What is returned? See possible answers