General Purpose Tier for Azure SQL Database
Five years ago, there were a limited number of ways to deploy and use the SQL Server engine in the Azure Cloud. Today, there are many different services available.
Record responses for the State of Database DevOps report
The fourth annual State of Database DevOps report is now available for download. Kendra Little announces the launch in her latest blog. Check out the first high level findings of the report here.
Handling Aggregations on a Poorly Designed Database
When the database design is not great, you may have to write some creative queries to get what you need.
The Dangers of using Float or Real Datatypes
Floating point datatypes accommodate very big numbers but sacrifice precision. They are handy for some types of scientific calculations, but are dangerous when used more widely, because they can introduce big rounding errors.
Using SQL Server RAND Function Deep Dive
Dr. Dallas Snider, a MSSQLTips author, mentioned that SQL Server RAND() function could generate random values uniformly distributed from 0 through 1, exclusive. He generated random numbers from the normal distribution with a specific mean and standard deviation.
A New World of Data
I started in the early days of SQL Server, when having a gigabyte of disk storage was unheard of, much less a gigabyte of RAM. My watch has more storage space than the mainframe we replaced with an early version of SQL Server years ago. The technical possibilities and amounts of data we are capable […]
A quick search without an index
Alex Chamchourine explains how he managed to find a row in a billion row table without an index.
Checking for Database Events Using Extended Events and SQL Monitor
You need to make sure that nobody tampers with your production databases, or really any databases outside Development. Even if you weren't of a nervous disposition, you'd want to know if a database was stopped or removed. You'd also be intrigued by the sudden unrehearsed addition of a database to a production server.
Simple DBCC CHECKDB process to report on database corruption for all SQL Server databases
As DBAs, we all know how important it is to check all of the SQL Server databases under our care for potential corruption issues. However, to accomplish that, we might not have the time to do any of the following:
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