Hidden treasures of SQL Prompt
You are invited to discover features of SQL Prompt that you may not even know exist. We will will walk you through the treasure map of SQL Prompt and show you where all the great features are buried.
Questions about Comparing Databases with SQL Compare that you were Too Shy to Ask
Phil Factor offers straightforward answers to tricky SQL Compare questions.
Keeping Your Staff
Retaining staff is always a challenge for many organizations. Today Steve talks about the difficulties of doing so and in choosing who to retain.
When one of your DBA colleagues leaves the company, what is your checklist?
A colleague left the company, a couple of days after SQL Server processes start failing...what do you do?
How SQL Prompt Improves SQL Server Database Development
While everyone knows SQL Prompt for its code completion and IntelliSense features, a lot of its extra value comes from features that allow the development team to standardize coding practices and drive up code quality.
Running Container Workloads in Microsoft Azure
Containers are being used by more and more organizations to automate build pipelines in their CICD processes. In this article, Mahendran Purushothaman shows how to automate the creation of Docker containers and a Kubernetes cluster in Azure.
A Getting Started PostgreSQL Tutorial
Introduction to PostgreSQL PostgreSQL is a free and general purpose open source object-relational database system that uses and extends the SQL language. Though originally designed to run on UNIX platforms, PostgreSQL is eligible to run on various platforms such as Linux, macOS, Solaris, and Windows. PostgreSQL databases provide enterprise-class database solutions and are used by […]
Do You Know What the Settings Should Be?
Estate management keeps getting more complex, especially with the move to the cloud, or to multiple clouds. Today Steve talks about the need to ensure you know what the settings are in your environments.
3 Ways to Run DBCC CHECKDB Faster
In my last post, I talked about how you can get 43%-67% faster backups. This time, I’m using that same SQL Server setup to discuss how throwing more CPU cores might help you check for corruption faster if you’ve already got modern fast storage.
Solving the Provisioning Problem in Database Development using Clones
When database development is described, the details often get vague when the data gets beyond spreadsheet-size. There is 'hand-waving' talk of providing databases for each developer, but little detail of how you would provision all the databases that would be needed, at the correct version and with the correct development data, and then keep them all in sync with the source code, as developers commit changes. This article explains the requirements, and how SQL Clone can meet them.
Blogs
Who Are You Doing It For?
By Brian Kelley
But as I've matured over the years, I came to realize that I needed...
Presenting Twice in May 2026
By alevyinroc
I will be presenting my latest session, Documenting Your Work for Worry-Free Vacations, in-person...
Finding the Next Sequence Value: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
I saw a question asking about the next sequence value and decided to try...
Forums
DB Design Methods
I've read a few posts regarding what we use to design DB models and...
Auto Update Statistics not triggering on filtered indexes
I've got a table with 186,703,969 rows, about 300GB of data. There are several...
What is the difference between SQL Server and SQL Database?
I created a SQL Database in Azure Portal but I've just noticed it also...
Question of the Day
An Unusual Identity
What values are returned when I run this code?
CREATE TABLE dbo.IdentityTest2
(
id NUMERIC(10,0) IDENTITY(10,10) PRIMARY KEY,
somevalue VARCHAR(20)
)
GO
INSERT dbo.IdentityTest2
(
somevalue
)
VALUES
( 'Steve')
, ('Bill')
GO
SELECT top 10
id
FROM dbo.IdentityTest2 See possible answers