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.
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