Anyone who’s spent years writing T-SQL has a mental list of “why doesn’t SQL Server just do this already?” moments. Here are 9 of those from Louis Davidson’s perspective – a wish list of practical, coding-oriented feature requests drawn from real-world pain points.
If you've spent years writing SQL for a living, you already know how this goes. Someone pings you on Teams asking, "How many active customers do we have in the Midwest this quarter?" There you are, back in the query editor, writing a JOIN you've written fifty times before. Genie Spaces in Databricks is built […]
Lots of organizations use multiple database platforms. Steve notes there is a cost to choosing to allow this.
Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server is designed to bring on-premises and multi-cloud SQL Server instances under centralized Azure management, but a newly documented privilege escalation technique shows how that same management workflow can be turned against the server it’s meant to protect.
If you own a business application, you’re accountable for its uptime, its cost, and its performance, even if you’ve never opened SQL Server Management Studio in your life. But most guidance out there is written for DBAs, not for the people who actually make decisions about the app.
This webinar on Sept 16 is different. We’ll walk through real findings from real SQL Server environments — the kind of things that quietly cause slow page loads, failed backups, and surprise outages — and translate each one into what it actually means for you: What did it cost? What was the risk? What would you have needed to ask your team (or your vendor) to catch it sooner?
How important is your job to you? Today's guest editorial from Andy Warren asks the question of the professionals out there, some of whom do great work, but don't care about their jobs.
tl;dr The title says it all. Prologue One of the keys to my personal learning is that, very early in my database career, I taught myself how to make lot’s of rows of Random Constrained Data in a comparatively short time. With the help of a few good folks over time, the method has been […]
This guide has everything you need to know about JSON indexing in SQL Server 2025: what it is, how it works, and current limitations.
You may not be old, but I sure am. As I travel around to all the different conferences to speak, whether we're talking a dev conference, SQL Server, or PostgreSQL, one of the topics that keeps coming up is age. The age of the organizers. It's mostly the same people putting on events for the […]
See how SQL Server's Parameter Sensitive Plan optimization handles skewed parameters, how to verify dispatcher plans, and where PSP still falls short.
By Steve Jones
This is timely, as I’m currently on a boat in the Adriatic taking a...
You can find the slides and SQL scripts for my session “Spice up your...
By SQLPals
How to Clear the SSMS Cache (SSMS 21 and Later) Updated...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Using CHOOSE()
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Re-Seeding a Broken Log Shipping...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The DBA is Dead! Long...
We have this code that sets some status values and then queries them using the CHOOSE() function in SQL Server 2025.
CREATE TABLE Status
(
StatusID INT,
StatusDescription VARCHAR(20)
);
GO
INSERT dbo.Status
(
StatusID,
StatusDescription
)
VALUES
(0, 'Uncategorized'),
(1, 'Active'),
(2, 'Inactive'),
(3, 'Temp');
GO
SELECT CHOOSE(StatusID, 'Unknown', 'Active', 'Inactive', 'Temporary')
FROM Status;
When the SELECT runs, what is returned? See possible answers