SQL Database: How to Configure Active Geo-Replication

Active Geo-location is powerful magic for ensuring the high availability of a Azure SQL database, and for disaster-recovery. In choosing the best options, you need to accurately understand the value that the business places on the service you're running, long it will take for a secondary replica to be in synch with the primary replica, the importance of spreading the location of replicas widely, and the maximum tolerable unscheduled downtime. Just clicking all the options could prove to be expensive.

Byte Me: Cloud Storage

Real-time Operational Analytics in SQL Server 2016 - Part 2

Arshad Ali discusses the different design considerations for leveraging the Real-time Operational Analytics feature of SQL Server 2016, covering the different scenarios where it fits or does not fit, and how to get started with it for disk based tables.

Database Nonsense - Unstructured Data

Sloppy terminology leads to big misunderstandings. Terms don't get much sloppier than "Unstructured data".

Managing Registered servers with SQL Powershell

Learn how to generate Registered Servers with PowerShell in this article.

Master Data Services – The Basics

Master Data Services (MDS) is Microsoft's platform for supporting Master Data Management (MDM). A system like MDS, if properly maintained, gives organisations a powerful alternative to increasingly having to centralize databases as a way of preventing data from getting out sync or become inconsistent, and a reliable way of managing the flow of data through corporate IT systems. It makes microservice architectures realistic. Hari Yadav shows you how to get up and running with MDS.

EzAdo - Part 1

EzAdo is a very simple api built to exploit some new features of SQL 2016. It combines software, convention, and creativity to get more done in less time.

Who is that masked man anyway?

If you are holding, in your organisation, personal data about real people or commerce, it is wrong, and in many cases illegal to do database development work or testing using your production data. This, of course, probably applies to a minority of database systems, but data breaches caused by attacking backups or copies of production […]

The Sort that Spills to Level 15,000

Paul White shows that SQL Server sometimes produces very misleading information about the impact of sort operations.

JSON Select - Easily query values from JSON

Introducing JSON Select - a new library that makes it easy to pull values out of JSON strings in SQL Server 2005+