Database Security, People and Processes
Protecting data is not easy, but it is critical. In this article, David Poole discusses database security and the behaviors needed to build secure systems.
Removing the Square Bracket Decorations with SQL Prompt
If you avoid illegal characters and reserved words in your identifiers, you'll rarely need delimiters. Sadly, SSMS applies square bracket delimiters indiscriminately, as a precaution, when generating build scripts. Phil Factor provides a handy function that adds quoted delimiters only where they are really needed and then sits back and lets SQL Prompt strip out any extraneous square brackets, in a flash.
Move Data from SQL Server to Azure Blob Storage with Incremental Changes – Part 2
In part 2 of this article, learn how you can move incremental changes in a SQL Server table using Azure Data Factory.
New release: SQL Change Automation 4.1
We’ve heard from users that they really care about static data and were missing the feature in the SQL Change Automation SSMS plugin. In v4.1, we’ve added support for the tracking of static data tables to the SSMS extension, alongside existing support in the VS extension. Maya Malakova has written a technical summary showing how to use this feature. Learn more about the release here.
Types of SQL Server Indexes
In this tip we will go through each type of index that is available in SQL Server and give an overview as well as advice on which index types fit each particular use case.
SSAS Error: Duplicate attribute key found when processing
Learn how to resolve a duplicate value error when processing dimensions in SSAS.
Using Aliases in SQL Prompt
Phil Factor explores the role of table aliases, explaining when they are required, and their general purpose otherwise, the need for sensible naming of aliases, and how SQL Prompt handles them.
Using Calendars and Dates in Power BI
You can use a host of time-intelligence functions in DAX to calculate everything from simple year-to-date totals to moving averages and average opening and closing balances. In this article, Andy Brown shows how to model various scenarios with calendars and dates, and how to get around some of the issues you may encounter.
How Do We Prove Expertise?
Today, Grant Fritchey talks about the two paths to expertise for database professionals and why it’s hard to really know if someone is an expert.
SSRS Audit: All reports executed/not-executed during previous 30 days
This article presents a pair of queries and reports that reads the ReportServer.dbo.ExecutionLog table to list all SSRS reports that were executed or not-executed in the past 30 days, how many times they were executed, and who executed them.
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