Open Source is Not a Career Path
A reprint from the early days of SQLServerCentral as Steve is on vacation. Here is Steve Jones' Open Source Musings from February 3, 2005.
Improve Row Count Estimates for Table Variables without Changing Code
Table variables can cause performance issues with joins when they contain a large number of rows. In SQL Server 2019, Microsoft has improved how the optimizer works with table variables which can improve performance without making changes to your code. In this article, Greg Larsen explains how this feature works and if it really does make a difference.
Testing SQL Server Stored Procedures and Functions with SQL Data Compare
Phil Factor demonstrates a cunning way to test stored procedures or functions, such as after refactoring, by storing the 'before' and 'after' results in views and then using SQL Data Compare to spot any discrepancies.
Evaluating Life at Work
It can be hard to evaluate your career and job situation, but Steve has some ideas today.
Can I Offload DBCC CHECKDB To Another Server?
You want to check for corruption, but you don’t want to slow down your primary production server. In this post, I’m specifically talking about offloading the corruption checking process. I’m not talking about doing corruption checking on both the primary and other servers – that’s wonderful, and if you’re doing that, you should hug yourself. You’re doing a good job. Who’s a good dog? You are! Good dog.
What is the impact of remote working on estate management?
Distributed workforces have very quickly become the norm. The 2020 State of Database Monitoring survey explores the impact of remote working on estate management and how organisations are responding. You can read the full findings in the free report, here.
Provisioning Azure SQL Database with Failover groups using Terraform
Get a basic introduction to Terraform by deploying and removing SQL Servers and a failover group to Azure.
Why Billing Will Be Part of Our Job
I am old enough to remember when many large corporations implemented chargebacks. Essentially, each internal department was charged for their usage of IT systems, similar to how we are charged in the cloud. It was a mess, and individual departments had to answer for excessive charges. I don't know that any department ever lost service, […]
Hands-On with Columnstore Indexes: Part 1 Architecture
Microsoft introduced Columnstore with SQL Server 2012 and have improved the feature in every version since then. You may be wondering why they are different than traditional indexes and how they work. In this series, Edward Pollack explains the architecture of Columnstore indexes. In future articles in the series, he will describe best practices for Columnstore.
Blogs
Programmatically Retrieving MLV Lineage and Refresh Times
Materialized lake views (MLVs) in Microsoft Fabric are an effective way to implement medallion...
Upgrading SQL Server Containers on the Laptop
By Steve Jones
I don’t have SQL Server installed on my laptop. In an effort to keep...
Forums
Having Issue deploying a report to an on prem server from PowerBI desktop
Using PowerBI Version1.25.9508.3237(January 2026). Installed Microsoft Power BI Desktop (Optimized for Power BI Report...
SQL 2019 instance with AG, across 2 Windows 2016 OS servers - OSin-place upgrade
Hi all Can I get some perspective from the community please on performing in-place...
How Long is a Long I/O?
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How Long is a Long...
Question of the Day
How Long is a Long I/O?
In SQL Server 2025, a long I/O is recorded in the error log with message 833. How long much an I/O request be outstanding before this message is written to the log?
See possible answers