Managing Always Encrypted Locally Stored Certificates in PowerShell
Learn how you can automate the creation of the CML and CEK for Always Encrypted in SQL Server
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.
Blogs
Advice I Like: Pyramid Schemes
By Steve Jones
If someone is trying to convince you it’s not a pyramid scheme, it’s a...
Using Prompt AI for a Travel Data Analysis
By Steve Jones
I was looking back at my year and decided to see if SQL Prompt...
FinOps for Kubernetes: Leveraging OpenCost, KubeGreen, and Kubecost for Cost Efficiency
In the era of cloud-native applications, Kubernetes has become the default standard platform for...
Forums
Database file shrink issue.
Hi experts, I have a 3+ TB database on a 2019 sql server which...
The North Star for the Year
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The North Star for the...
Multiple Escape Characters
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Multiple Escape Characters
Question of the Day
Multiple Escape Characters
In SQL Server 2025, I run this code (in a database with the appropriate collation):
SELECT UNISTR('%*3041%*308A%*304C%*3068 and good night', '%*') AS 'A Classic';
What is returned? See possible answers