Proactive Performance Tuning
Being proactive in trying to improve your system is good, but sometimes your team might cause you problems with their efforts.
Stairway to Biml 9 – Refactoring a Simple Custom Biml Framework
This level of the Stairway to Biml examines how to refactor your Biml into an easier to maintain format.
HSA for Training
Is there a good way to ensure employees get trained? Steve has a few thoughts today on an idea that could help.
It's More Than What You Know
I'm a firm believer in keeping your tech skills up to date, as well as your social skills, What better way than attending or presenting at a conference or group meeting. The reason to attend an event I'm very fortunate that my company allows me training days and time for personal development, covering all expenses […]
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.
How SQL Server Can Just Go Faster
It’s rare to get a call from a customer telling you that the application is fast today and thanks for taking such good care of the database. Instead, you are more likely to hear complaints when things go wrong like slow running queries and timeouts. There is a lot to consider when trying to figure […]
View R Plots from within SQL Server Management Studio
Describes how to view R plots in SSMS and gives a brief introduction to R plotting
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