Storage 101: Welcome to the Wonderful World of Storage
Understanding all the storage options available to...
The New Year: A Chance to Start Over
January 1st is the beginning of a new year thanks to Julius Caesar and Pope Gregory XIII. This date is somewhat arbitrary, and many religions and cultures celebrate their own beginning of a new year at different times. Even though these celebrations don’t fall at the same time, I think the sentiment is similar. The […]
OUTPUT Clause Basics (For Inserts and Deletes)
When INSERTING or DELETING rows from a table, the OUTPUT clause can be used to return a dataset containing the changes made. Mat Richardson explains how.
The Best DBA Gifts
Today Steve asks if there is anything you'd want as a gift that would make your job better.
Do You Have REFERENCES?
The logic for referential integrity can be implemented in application code, but to make sure that it is enforced, include foreign key constraints in the database design instead. In this article, Joe Celko talks about the history of references in SQL and the options available today.
A Dearth of Data
A new technique developed by Microsoft is designed to help AI/ML models get trained with minimal data.
SSISDB Catalog Defaults Best Practices
Introduction The SSISDB database (a.k.a. the SSISDB catalog) was introduced back in SQL Server 2012 to de-clutter the MSDB database and provide an in-house logging and reporting infrastructure. In a nutshell, SSISDB is an SSIS framework making SQL Server Integration Services more robust and enterprise-friendly by providing the following features: Database backup Database encryption Support […]
ASP.NET Core with GitOps: Deploying Infrastructure as Code
Automation of server builds minimizes human error, ensures that environments are identical, and saves time building servers. This article from Mircea Opera demonstrates provisioning one server or multiple load-balanced servers in AWS with code.
SQL Server Transparent Data Encryption vs. NetLib Encryptionizer
Between the legislation over the years (HIPAA, GLBA, GDPR, CCPA, etc.) and data breaches from large organizations that seem to pop-up in the news on a monthly basis, SQL Server database encryption is critical for our industry. SQL Server ships with a few options for a native encryption implementation (Column Level Encryption, Transparent Data Encryption, Data Masking, Always Encrypted), that all provide value in particular situations, but none of the options all seem to address all of the needs. What is the best way to encrypt our SQL Server data?
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