Understanding the difference between IS NULL and = NULL
This article by James Travis details the differences between IS NULL and = NULL. He also discusses the ANSI_NULLS setting.
Database Code Analysis
Database code analysis will reduce the number of 'code smells' that creep into your database builds. It will alert the team to mistakes or omissions, such as missing indexes, that are likely to cause performance problems in production. It will allow the Governance and Operations team visibility into production readiness of the code, warning them of security loopholes and vulnerabilities. William Brewer describes the two technical approaches to database code analysis, static and dynamic, and suggests some tools that can help you get started.
Opinions and Votes
When we look to improve software, we are often expressing our opinion on which items need to be handled first. It's helpful to keep in mind that it's an opinion being expressed, and not a vote, no matter how much it is solicited by a company.
How to Read a Transaction Log Backup
The transaction log backup is stored in SQL Server proprietary format, just like the transaction log itself. Even though the transaction log backup is in a special format, Microsoft has provided us with the fn_dump_dblog() function to read transaction log backups. This function is undocumented, so you should use care when using this function in a production environment.
Monitoring Azure Cloud and Hybrid Environments
Cloud-based services and applications must still be monitored just like the on-premise ones. You still need most of your data center activities that ensure that your planning, budgeting, security and service-level obligations are met wherever the data and services are actually hosted. There is much to be said for an integrated approach to providing a unified view of entire application workloads on-premise. hybrid and cloud using the same tools wherever possible.
Hiring Heterogeneously
Hiring a diverse group of people can make your team work better. Steve Jones has a few thoughts today.
Using Database Master Keys in SQL Server
Learn the basics of Database Master Keys and how you can use them in SQL Server.
Let’s Corrupt a Database Together, Part 3: Detecting Corruption
Having already shown how to corrupt a database, and then how nonclustered indexes can be corrupted independently, in this post Brent Ozar explains how you can detect corruption.
Hiring Guitarists
Hiring senior people is hard, but Steve Jones stumbled upon an idea that compares hiring technology people to hiring a senior level technology expert.
Blogs
How to Find Expensive Queries in Amazon Redshift
Slow-running queries can degrade your Redshift cluster’s performance and lead to increased costs. Identifying...
The Notification Trap: How Input Fatigue Is Killing Deep Work in Tech
By gbargsley
If you've been here before, you know this blog is usually about SQL Server,...
Designing a Storage Load Test for SQL Server
I’ve been doing storage load tests for SQL Server for a long time, both...
Forums
How Long is a Long I/O?
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How Long is a Long...
T-SQL Trigonometric Functions in SQL Server
Comments posted to this topic are about the item T-SQL Trigonometric Functions in SQL...
Half of All Engineers
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Half of All Engineers
Question of the Day
How Long is a Long I/O?
In SQL Server 2025, a long I/O is recorded in the error log with message 833. How long much an I/O request be outstanding before this message is written to the log?
See possible answers