There was a day when you didn’t have many decisions to make about a new SQL Server instance. You had to choose from a few editions and two licensing models: per proc or server cal. It wasn’t long ago that SQL Server would almost always be installed on a physical server on premises, and the […]
Microsoft has released a version of SQL Server 2017 for Linux.
Developer shops may decide to use Read Committed Snapshot Isolation (RCSI) to reduce contention, and possibly improve performance, but it is not without its own pitfalls. In this article, Uwe Ricken describes a situation where long running transactions caused a severe performance degradation when RCSI was in use.
We often make changes to production systems in an ad hoc manner. Steve asks how much auditing we might have in place.
You have times where you need to copy/paste something out of SSMS' grid view results pane that has a carriage return in it. Trying to copy/paste that data into Excel can be a headache and cause you to waste precious time reformatting. This just offers a tidbit of PowerShell code to help.
Stored procedures, for example, are very easy to document. The comment block at the beginning stays with the code and a CREATE or ALTER script contains everything to reproduce the proc. SQL Server tables, however, are more difficult to document. You can use Extended Properties to document columns and constraints, but working with Extended Properties is difficult at best. Phil Factor demonstrates ways to easily add Extended Properties to your build scripts.
Updates this week for SQL 2014, 2016, 2017 and SSMS have Steve thinking about the pace of patching.
This article shows how DefaultBufferMaxRows and DefaultBufferSize properties can be used to improve dataflow task performance.
Brent Ozar takes a look at four different ways to get a random row from a large SQL Server table.
By Steve Jones
If someone is trying to convince you it’s not a pyramid scheme, it’s a...
By Steve Jones
I was looking back at my year and decided to see if SQL Prompt...
In the era of cloud-native applications, Kubernetes has become the default standard platform for...
Hi experts, I have a 3+ TB database on a 2019 sql server which...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The North Star for the...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item 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