What's the Cost of an Hour?
Outages can be expensive, and today Steve asks if you know just how expensive they are for your organization.
Free Fundamentals of Index Tuning Week: Part 3, Indexing for Joins
Previously we covered Part 1: Indexing for the WHERE Clause, and then we covered ORDER BY. Today, let’s tackle joins.
What’s New in SQL Monitor 10?
SQL Monitor 10 packs a lot more under the hood in terms of connectivity, establishing cause-and-effect, and alerting. This article provides the high-level tour of the features we've introduced or improved, and why.
Don't Lose Data Without a Hacker
Data loss shouldn't come from simple misconfiguration. As Steve notes, if no hacking is involved, you shouldn't lose data.
Restore SQL Server database using data management provider REST API
Learn how to restore sql server database using data management provider Rubrik REST API
Build and fill a SQL Server Database using SQL Compare CLI and a Batch Script
Phil Factor provides a powerful DOS batch script which, when coupled with SQL Compare CLI, allows you to build databases from source, during development, and fill them with the specific datasets required for testing.
Verifying Object Exists and Dropping Object with One Statement
For years you probably have been writing code similar to the code below to verify an object exist prior to dropping it.
SQL Is Always Going to be Popular
Steve thinks that learning more about the SQL language is always a good career investment.
SQL Server Extended Properties: Stairway to Exploring Database Metadata Level 7
In this level, I’ll introduce Extended Properties. As with the previous levels, I want to illustrate as much as possible with practical and immediately useful code.
Never Create Columns with ANSI_PADDING set to OFF
There is no good reason for having ANSI_PADDING set to OFF when you create tables in SQL Server. It was provided purely for legacy databases that had code that assumed the old CHAR behavior for dealing with padding, and its use has now been deprecated.
Blogs
SQL Saturday Boston Slides and Code
By Steve Jones
Thanks to everyone who attended my sessions today at SQL Saturday Boston 2025. I’ve...
Scaling SQL Server 2025 Vector Search with Load-Balanced Ollama Embeddings
SQL Server 2025 introduces native support for vector data types and external AI models....
Advice I Like: Fear and Imagination
By Steve Jones
Fear is fueled by a lack of imagination. The antidote to fear is not...
Forums
How to use data pre-computed in previous ETL SSIS Nodes?
I'm building ETL packages in SSIS. My data comes from an OLE DB Source...
Building AI Governance and Policies- First Steps
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Building AI Governance and Policies-...
Simple delete causes table scan on other tables with foreign key
Why is sql doing a full scan VS seeking on the index? I've included...
Question of the Day
Checking Identities
The DBCC CHECKIDENT command is used when working with identity values. I have a table with 10 rows in it that looks like this:
TravelLogID CityID StartDate EndDate 1 1 2025-01-11 2025-01-16 2 2 2025-01-11 2025-01-16 3 3 2025-01-11 2025-01-16 4 4 2025-01-11 2025-01-16 5 5 2025-01-11 2025-01-16 6 6 2025-01-11 2025-01-16 7 7 2025-01-11 2025-01-16 8 8 2025-01-11 2025-01-16 9 9 2025-01-11 2025-01-16 10 10 2025-01-11 2025-01-16The docs for DBCC CHECKIDENT say this if I run with only the table parameter: "If the current identity value for a table is less than the maximum identity value stored in the identity column, it is reset using the maximum value in the identity column. " I run this code:
DELETE dbo.TravelLog WHERE TravelLogID >= 9
GO
DBCC CHECKIDENT(TravelLog, RESEED)
GO
INSERT dbo.TravelLog
(
CityID,
StartDate,
EndDate
)
VALUES
(4, '2025-09-14', '2025-09-17')
GO
What is the identity value for the new row inserted by the insert statement above? See possible answers