Setting Session Skill Levels
Kathi Kellenberger discusses the challenge of deciding how to describe the content in the sessions she presents.
Why DBAs Must Embrace DevOps
A good day for a database administrator (DBA) is a lot like a good airline flight. A lot of excitement in either situation is bad. In a perfect world, a DBA will be productive and not spending most of their time “putting out fires.” (And fires are never a good idea on a flight!)
Building or Buying Analytics
One of the decisions that I've been involved with at the beginning of every software project is whether to buy software to solve the problem or build our own. This might be a quick "is there software anyone knows about to do this?" query, or an in-depth review of the marketplace or something in between. […]
Microsoft Exercise
We have got a deal for you, Microsoft is concerned about the health of your company and is doing something about it.
Parse Data from a Field Containing Multiple Values using CROSS APPLY
It is possible for a field in a character-delimited text file to contain a list of further-delimited values instead of the customary single value. This article demonstrates how to load such a file into a staging table, then use a CROSS APPLY query to parse the list of values into a related table.
5 Questions to Ask When You Upgrade SQL Server
Whether you’re looking to go cutting-edge and hop on SQL Server 2019 as soon as it’s available, or whether you’re just trying to evacuate from SQL Server 2008 to anything that’s going to be supported after this summer, you’re probably doing upgrade projects. This is a good time to ask yourself 5 questions...
SQL Server and R with dplyr Package Examples for mutate, transmute, summarise, group_by, pipe and filter
In this second part of this tip series we take a look at the dplyr package for R that can be used to query data using the R Language with SQL Server and build data visualizations.
Cloud Pace
There are a couple big changes that the cloud brings to us. Steve has a few comments today.
Bloor scores SQL Provision 4.5 out of 5 for test data provisioning
In this independent review of SQL Provision, the Bloor analyst finds that SQL Provision’s combination of database cloning and data masking stands out with “clear advantages over competing approaches, such as data subsetting or synthetic data generation.”
Blogs
Getting Started with the MSSQL AI Agent in VS Code
By Steve Jones
Recently I was working in VS Code and I saw a walkthrough for the...
Summer Speaking Summary 2025
By alevyinroc
In the blink of an eye, summer has passed. I don’t know about you,...
From Chaos to Clarity: How Microsoft Purview Streamlines Data Governance
By Chris Yates
In today’s digital landscape, data is both a strategic asset and a potential liability....
Forums
Azure elastic query credential question
I am trying to check out elastic query between two test instances we have...
Change Tracking Data Retention Options
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Change Tracking Data Retention Options
Requiring Technical Debt Payments
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Requiring Technical Debt Payments
Question of the Day
Change Tracking Data Retention Options
If I am running this code:
ALTER DATABASE AdventureWorks2017 SET CHANGE_TRACKING = ON (CHANGE_RETENTION=4 xxx);What are the possible choices for xxx? See possible answers