Backup Preparations
This week Steve asks you to make sure you practice your restore skills periodically.
A Database Design Test
Steve Jones saw a database design test for developers, but he's never been given one.
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.
Blogs
Shifting Mindsets: Why FinOps is Essential for Cloud Efficiency
By HeyMo0sh
As a DevOps practitioner, I’ve always focused on performance, scalability, and automation. But as...
March 2026 SQL Server Security Updates
By Brian Kelley
On Patch Tuesday, in addition to OS and Office security patches, Microsoft also released...
How Fabric Mirroring Transformed with SQL Server 2025
When mirroring was first released for Azure SQL Database, it used Change Data Capture...
Forums
Multiple Deployment Processes
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Multiple Deployment Processes
How to Use sqlpackage to Detect Schema Drift Between Azure SQL Databases
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How to Use sqlpackage to...
Upgrading Admin Queries
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Upgrading Admin Queries
Question of the Day
Upgrading Admin Queries
I have a query from a former DBA that we run on SQL Server 2025 to check on database metadata. This query references sys.sysaltfiles. I want to refactor this code to be more modern. Which DMV should I reference instead?
See possible answers