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.
Securely Manage Database Credentials Using Visual Studio Manage User Secrets
In this tip we cover how to manage application secrets in a development environment to securely store database credentials.
Build the VCS Habit
Steve thinks version control is a fundamental and critical part of working in technology.
Fetch Web Data in Power BI
Introduction Reporting on web data has been a fascinating part of developing any dashboard or reports in Power BI. Often this data is available either free that can be consumed anonymously or by using some kind of authentication mechanism. In this article, I'm going to demonstrate how to connect to a web application from Power […]
Translating a SQL Server Schema into a Cassandra Table: Part II Integrity Constraints
Complex integrity constraints are more challenging to enforce in Cassandra than they are in a relational database. In this article, Shel Burkow walks through four modelling examples in Cassandra involving constraints.
What’s in that database? Getting information about routines
There is a lot of information held in SQL Server metadata about your SQL Server procedures, triggers, views and functions. Some of it is valuable, other nuggets are useful and a few are rather dull but worthy. It really all needs to be tied together to tell the full story, especially if you are not able to, or do not want to, query the metadata directly.
Combining many crossing intervals
This article demonstrates how the geometric functions in SQL can be use to solve the Islands and Gaps problem.
Blogs
Keeping Redshift System Table History Past 7 Days with S3 Tables
Redshift keeps its SYS_* monitoring views for seven days in cluster, which is fine...
Updating the Data API Builder
By Steve Jones
I was updating my session for the Data API Builder (DAB) recently, mostly to...
T-SQL Tuesday #202 Invitation: That One SQL Server Outage You’ll Never Forget
I am excited to host T-SQL Tuesday for the first time. I want to...
Forums
Practical Ways to Approach SQL Server Problems and Case Studies
Working with SQL Server can involve more than just writing queries. Understanding database design,...
Measuring Productivity
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Measuring Productivity
Importing Excel files into SQL Server using DuckDB and Python
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Importing Excel files into SQL...
Question of the Day
Tracking All the Queries
I have 3 instances of a brand new long running query that are executing on a SQL Server 2025 instance. Query store is enabled. One of the queries is killed by the administrator, one is cancelled by the user. The other runs to completion. How many rows are in Query Store for this query?
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