What is normal? Finding outliers with R
How do you currently set alerting thresholds? What is normal? And more importantly, what is truly abnormal? We will explore these questions.
UNION ALL Optimization
Paul White digs into row goals as he explains some interesting and inconsistent behavior with UNION ALL queries in SQL Server.
Guilty of Over-Customising
Am I guilty of over-customising software? Read this and let us know what you think.
The Value of Surveys
Phil Factor on the perils of trying to squeeze good insights out of bad surveys.
Two Approaches to Addressing Circular References in SSDT
Both options have their advantages and disadvantages. Neither is universally right for all situations. Understand the differences before picking the model that works for your situation.
Guide to enhancing privacy and addressing GDPR requirements with the Microsoft SQL platform
A new whitepaper published today gives Microsoft SQL customers technical guidance for how to approach GDPR compliance with Microsoft SQL technologies.
Scala and Apache Spark in Tandem as a Next-Generation ETL Framework
Scala and Apache Spark might seem an unlikely medium for implementing an ETL process, but there are reasons for considering it as an alternative. After all, many Big Data solutions are ideally suited to the preparation of data for input into a relational database, and Scala is a well thought-out and expressive language. Krzysztof Stanaszek describes some of the advantages and disadvantages of a scala-based approach to implementing and testing an ETL solution.
Understanding OPENJSON and FOR JSON in Azure and SQL 2016
An example of exporting and importing table data with JSON in Azure and SQL Server 2016.
Statistics in SQL: Pearson’s Correlation
Some people will assure you that you can't do any serious statistical calculations in SQL. In the first of a series of articles, Phil factor aims to prove them wrong by explaining how easy it is to calculate Pearson's Product Moment Correlation.
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