Export data from SQL Server to Excel
What native SQL Server options are available to export to Excel? Jeremy Kadlec explains.
Handling Data Corruption
This week Steve Jones wonders what you might do if you discovered data corruption.
Scoring Outliers in Non-Normal Data with R
Using R to detect outliers is relatively easy, but most methods assume your data is normally distributed. How do you handle skewed datasets?
Azure Automation Methods
Tim Radney of SQLskills walks through multiple automation methods you can use to manage and maintain your Azure SQL Databases.
Replace Bad Characters in Table
Learn how to clean bad characters from lots of data in this article.
Generating HTML from SQL Server Queries
You can produce HTML from SQL because SQL Server has built-in support for outputting XML, and HTML is best understood as a slightly odd dialect of XML that imparts meaning to predefined tags. There are plenty of edge cases where an HTML structure is the most obvious way of communicating tables, lists and directories. Where data is hierarchical, it can make even more sense. William Brewer gives a simple introduction to a few HTML-output techniques.
Classifying Sensitive Data
The ability to protect, and perhaps handle, sensitive data separately from other data is becoming more important. Steve Jones discusses the process and asks if it's something you perform on a regular basis.
Filegroup Restoring and Database Consistency
In this article, we'll explore a less used feature of SQL Server: filegroup restoring, feature that has an interesting consequence because database can become inconsistent without any warning and standard checks don't reveal any issue.
How to Read the Transaction Log File
Have you ever wanted to be able to see the actual transactions that are contained in the transaction log file? Greg Larsen shows you how to browse the transaction log using an undocumented function.
Blogs
Stupid Things I Did With AI: ASCII Art
By Steve Jones
I ran across this article recently (https://www.gatesnotes.com/meet-bill/source-code/reader/microsoft-original-source-code) and it has a great opening piece...
Simple Talks Podcasting in 2026
By Steve Jones
I’m in the UK today, having arrived this morning in London. Hopefully, by this...
SSMS 22 still inserting tabs instead of spaces
I’m not trying to start up a debate whether you should use tabs or...
Forums
Cumulative Update 23 - KB5074819 - Database Mail - No longer working.
Hi there, Has anyone else had any trouble with Database Mail in Cumulative Update...
Script Task execution error with HTTP request
I have a script task that tries to execute a HTTP request, which seems...
SQL Server 2025 Standard Developer Edition
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server 2025 Standard Developer...
Question of the Day
URL Safe or Not?
If I use BASE4_ENCODE() in SQL Server 2025, is the output URL Safe by default?
See possible answers