Priorities and Productivity

Managing a complex workload is a skill many of us need to acquire and maintain. Today Steve has a few ideas on how to do that.

Stairway to SSAS Tabular Level 8: Multiple Fact Tables and Perspectives

In this eighth step of the SSAS Tabular Stairway start to expand the model beyond one fact table.

Getting Started with SQL Server Azure Container Instances ACI

Learn how to quickly deploy a new SQL Server instance on Azure using Azure Container Instances ACI.

SQL Compare 14 now available on Linux

The latest version of SQL Compare now offers a Command Line Interface on Linux for the first time. Now teams can benefit from the industry standard tool for comparing and deploying SQL Server databases, whether they choose to work on Windows, Linux, or both.

A Spectacular Case of 100% CPU Caused by Online Reindexing

An investigation of a serious performance issue during online re-indexing on a production server leads us to

interesting discoveries and solutions.

Very Hot Patches

Azure SQL Database can be patched without stopping the sqlsrvr.exe process. Quite a feat of engineering.

Implementing SQL Server Integration Services with Azure Data Factory

Azure SQL Database, unlike its on-premises counterparts, restricted its integration capabilities to those implemented directly by the database engine. To remediate this shortcoming, Microsoft provided equivalent functionality by relying on integration runtime of Azure Data Factory. In this article, you get an overview of this Azure-based SSIS offering.

Integrating SQL Server Tools into SQL Change Automation Deployments

Phil Factor shows how to integrate use of SQL Change Automation, SSMS registered servers, SMO, and BCP to automatically build or update a database on all servers in a group.

6 steps to a more secure SQL database

Security is often something people think about only after they have had a problem. Given that the average cost of a data breach is $3.92 million (SecurityIntelligence 2019) and ransomware attacks have increased 97% over the past 2 years (PhishMe 2019), the "if it's not broke, don't fix it" approach can clearly be catastrophic. Here […]

T-SQL Context Switching

Being a standards advocate, Steve has a few thoughts on team code structure.