Stairway to Database Design Level 8: Cursors
This final level to the first landing completes the basics of a SQL database, by explaining what cursors are and why you should never use them.
Free eBook: Performance Tuning with SQL Server Dynamic Management Views
Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) are a significant and valuable addition to the DBA's troubleshooting armory, laying bare previously unavailable information regarding the under-the-covers activity of your database sessions and transactions.
What is database continuous integration?
Have you ever longed for a way of making the delivery of databases more visible, predictable and measurable? Do you ever wish that they would be of better quality, quicker to change, and cost less? Grant Fritchey explains some of the secrets of doing Continuous Integration for Databases to relieve some of the pain-points of the Database Delivery process.
Ensure that SSRS is Working while Using Availability Groups
This article explains how to get around one of the issues when the SSRS databases are part of an Availability Group.
Improving SQL Monitor’s Database Performance
Jeremiah Peschka, a tech lead for SQL Monitor development, explains the new SQL Server configuration options available for the data repository, and how enabling them might improve SQL Monitor performance, when reading and writing monitoring data.
SQL Database Project with Git Feature Branch Workflow
In this tip we look at how to work with SQL Database Projects using Git source control and using branching to work on different features.
An Introduction to Azure Cosmos DB
Introduction Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft's globally distributed, multi-model platform-as-a-service (PaaS) database. Any web, mobile, gaming, and IoT application that needs to handle massive amounts of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data may use Azure Cosmos DB. Guaranteed high availability, high throughput, low latency, and tunable consistency help in reading and writing data at a global […]
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
Why SQL Server Database Attach fails and how to repair it
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Why SQL Server Database Attach...
Fixing P1 Queries
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Fixing P1 Queries
BIT_COUNT() IV
Comments posted to this topic are about the item BIT_COUNT() IV
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