The WFH Challenges
Working from home can be hard and Steve has a few ideas that might help you transition during these challenging times.
Moving on from Volunteer Projects
I can’t remember a time when I was not involved in side-projects, usually as a volunteer but also writing books or creating courses. New projects are like bright, shiny objects, and it’s easy to get involved in too many of them.
Overview of Azure Cache for Redis
Caching data is one way to improve application performance. In this article, Chandra Kudumla explains a service for caching data found in Azure called Azure Cache for Redis.
Secure Enclave Concerns
A new security flaw in Intel SGX is found by researchers. This may or may not be a problem, but you should be aware.
Approaches to Import JSON in SSIS (SQL Server 2016+) Part 1
In this article, 1st of 2-part series, we will look at 2 approaches to import JSON in SSIS using 2 methods: the new functionality of SQL Server 2016 and the Json.NET library.
Updating Certifications
Microsoft is retiring some certifications and offering others. Steve has a few thoughts on this.
Free Fundamentals of Index Tuning Week: Part 2, Indexing for ORDER BY
I’m teaching my Mastering Index Tuning pre-con at SQLBits and SQL Saturday Iceland, and part of the prerequisites is that you’re already familiar with my How to Think Like the Engine class and my Fundamentals of Index Tuning class. To make that easier, I’m running the Fundamentals of Index Tuning class this week on the blog.
Using the RANKX function in Power BI
Introduction In this article, I'll explain the use of the RANKX function available in DAX. The RANKX is a sortation function which is capable of performing a quite complex sorting and ranking based on the groups and values available in the dataset. It returns the ranking of a particular number available in each row of […]
Enterprise Insights from the 2020 State of Database DevOps report
17% of Enterprise respondents in this year's State of Database DevOps survey reported that DevOps has been adopted across all projects in their organization. This year’s State of Database DevOps report gave us some great insights into the landscape of Database DevOps. Kendra Little walks us through those insights specific to Enterprise organizations.
Free Fundamentals of Index Tuning Week: Part 1, Indexing for the WHERE Clause
I’m teaching my Mastering Index Tuning pre-con at SQLBits and SQL Saturday Iceland, and part of the prerequisites is that you’re already familiar with my How to Think Like the Engine class and my Fundamentals of Index Tuning class.
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?
See possible answers