Azure Data Lake stores petabytes of data and analyzes trillions of objects in one place with no constraints. Data Lake Store can store any type of data including massive data like high-resolution video, medical data, and data from a wide variety of industries. Data Lake Store scales throughput to support any size of analytic workload with low latency. Read on to learn more.
Why do employees leave their companies? There are a variety of reasons, but when your most talented people leave, that's a concern. Steve Jones comments on what we might do about this.
How does one get a truly random sample of data of a certain size from a SQL Server database table. Well, there are simple non-portable tricks one can use, such as the NewID() function, but then refining those can be tricky. Take the Rand() function for a start. Can it really provide you with a truly random number? Why doesn't the TABLESAMPLE clause give you a set number of rows? Joe Celko scratches his head a bit, explains some of the issues and invites some suggestions and tricks from readers.
There is already a template on the Azure marketplace for setting up an AlwaysOn Availability Group. In just a few easy steps you can get a working AlwaysOn Availability Group setup, configured and running - this post describes the steps to quickly set it up.
It is important to have people that do good work and are good to work with.
Erik figures out why SQL Server really doesn't like combining these two things in a query plan.
Azure SQL Database has a lot of integrity checks. Probably more than your local instance.
Phil Factor on the wise habit of timing your database routines, to avoid relying on received wisdom about performance.
Python is new to SQL Server 2017. It is intended primarily to allow the use of Python-based machine-learning within SQL Server, but it can be used for far more than this, with any Python libraries or Frameworks. To provide an example of what is possible, Hitendra shows how to use the feature securely to provide intelligent application caching, where SQL Server can automatically indicate when data changes to trigger a cache refresh.
By Steve Jones
While wandering around the documentation looking for some Question of the Day topics, I...
By Arun Sirpal
Third part in my Ai series with databases. When building AI solutions within the...
By Steve Jones
This month we have a very interesting invitation from Koen Verbeeck. He has hosted...
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As of June 2026, what is the best version of TLS to use with SQL Server?
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