Choosing a Career
Learning about new jobs is a good way to help decide if you want to change careers.
Data Migration Assistant tool for Azure SQL DB/Azure VM Assessment
Data Migration Assistant (DMA) to Check for SQL Server Compatibility Issues and Perform assessment when Migrating to Azure SQL Database or to SQL Server on an Azure Virtual machine.
Moving to Query Store
Steve is looking for people to use the Query Data Store and share their stories, good or bad.
Monitoring Azure Health Status Using Azure Portal - Part 1
In this tip we look at how you can monitor Azure health to know if there are any issues that may interupt your services running on Azure.
A T-SQL Code Testing Guide
Testing our database code is a fairly immature process for many of this, but perhaps we could build a guide that helps everyone learn to write better and more comprehensive tests.
Soundex - Experiments with SQLCLR Part 3
Acknowledging fundamental design flaws lead to a more flexible, maintainable phonetic framework
How Check Constraints MIGHT Improve Your Queries and Missing Index Requests
In theory, you get better execution plans when SQL Server understands the contents of your tables. In practice, well, it's hit or miss.
Nasty Fast N-Grams (Part 1): Character-Level Unigrams
An article about tally tables, N-Grams and the fastest character-level N-Grams function available today for SQL Server.
Creating Calculated Columns Using DAX
In this article, Andy Brown shares his knowledge of how to create calculated columns in tables, using Power BI as the host software (all of the formulae shown would work equally well in PowerPivot or SSAS Tabular). This article is designed to be the first in a series of articles which will show you how to master programming in DAX.
Blogs
Identity Columns Can’t Be Updated: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
I’m not sure I knew identity column values could not be updated. I ran...
Rolling Back a Broken Release
By Steve Jones
We had an interesting discussion about deployments in databases and how you go forward...
A bespoke reporting solution doesn’t have to cost the earth
By ChrisJenkins
You could be tolerating limited reporting because there isn’t an off the shelf solution...
Forums
Can someone please explain what happens?
I have mentioned this several times over several years. Can someone please help me...
SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT) returns null when nothing is found instead of 0
SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT Component) AS Found FROM tblComponents WHERE(Component NOT LIKE '%[a-z]%') AND(LTRIM(RTRIM(Component)) = 'GM13622')...
Remotely Engineer Fabric Lakehouse objects: The Fabric Modern Data Platform
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Remotely Engineer Fabric Lakehouse objects:...
Question of the Day
Creating JSON III
In a SQL Server 2025 table, called Beer, I have this data:
BeerIDBeerName 1Becks 2Fat Tire 3Mac n Jacks 4Alaskan Amber 8KirinI run this code:
SELECT JSON_OBJECTAGG(
BeerID: BeerName )
FROM beer;
What are the results? See possible answers