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.
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.
Blogs
A Career of Memories
By Steve Jones
Annabel retired from Redgate Software this week. Across most of my career at Redgate,...
Rethinking Index Maintenance: Why avg_fragmentation_in_percent Is Outdated and What You Should Do Instead
By Tim Radney
As a SQL Server DBA with years of experience tuning production environments, I’ve seen...
Microsoft Build 2026 announcements
By James Serra
Once again there were a number of Microsoft Build announcements related to data and...
Forums
Changes, Happiness, and a Few Tears
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Changes, Happiness, and a Few...
BCP on Linux
Comments posted to this topic are about the item BCP on Linux
You Probably Don't Need a Vector Database
Comments posted to this topic are about the item You Probably Don't Need a...
Question of the Day
BCP on Linux
When running bcp on Linux, what is the field terminator?
See possible answers