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
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
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...
An Unusual Identity
Comments posted to this topic are about the item An Unusual Identity
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