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.
SSRS Audit: All reports executed/not-executed during previous 30 days
This article presents a pair of queries and reports that reads the ReportServer.dbo.ExecutionLog table to list all SSRS reports that were executed or not-executed in the past 30 days, how many times they were executed, and who executed them.
Blogs
Learn about Modern Microsoft Apps in San Diego
By Steve Jones
I wrote about learning today for the editorial: I Can’t Make You Learn. I...
How To Deploy Fabric SQL and Azure SQL Databases with Azure DevOps
By ReviewMyDB
Fabric has CI/CD built in, but if you've tried to use it for database...
A New Word: Attriage
By Steve Jones
attriage – n. the state of having lost all control over how you feel...
Forums
SSRS Reminded Me of the Time Microsoft Retired TMG
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SSRS Reminded Me of the...
Getting results from a Procedure to join to a query
I have a need to execute a stored procedure and return the results to...
Upgrade 2016 Standard to 2022 Express
Title pretty much says it all - can this be done? I've tried several...
Question of the Day
BIT_COUNT II
In SQL Server 2025, I have a table (dbo.UserPermission) that contains this data:
UserID UserPermissions 15 23 37 4 NULLWhat is returned when I run this code:
select bit_count(UserPermissions) as PermissionCount from dbo.UserPermission where UserID = 4;See possible answers