Steve looks at a number of tools that you should spend time learning and building a level of comfort that enables you to use them in your daily work.

Performance Tuning Using Extended Events: Part 1

by Brian Davey

SQLServerCentral.com

Extended Events (XE)

In this article, learn how to identify performance tuning opportunities using Extended Events.

What's a forgivable mistake?

by Steve Jones

SQLServerCentral

Career Growth

Today Steve wonders if your company is understanding of your human frailty.

From Source Control to Database using SQL Compare Command Line

by Additional Articles

Redgate

Giorgi Abashidze explains how his team use SQL Compare Command line to automate database deployments for their customers, without having access to the real staging or production databases, merely by using our development database contained under TFS Source Control.

Understanding Azure Storage Options

by Additional Articles

SimpleTalk

Cloud Computing

The choices found when provisioning storage in Azure can be overwhelming. In this article, Monica Rathbun explains the options to help your organization research which storage might be right for your solution.

Expect the Unexpected with DiRT

by Steve Jones

SQLServerCentral

Disaster Recovery (DR)

Disaster recovery is no joke at Google, where they really test their systems, people, and processes.

UNION vs. UNION ALL in SQL Server

by Additional Articles

MSSQLTips.com

Sometimes there is a need to combine data from multiple tables or views into one comprehensive dataset. This may be for like tables within the same database or maybe there is a need to combine like data across databases or even across servers. I have read about the UNION and UNION ALL commands, but how do these work and how do they differ?