Releasing Databases in VSTS with Redgate SQL CI and Octopus Deploy
You can still do Database Lifecycle Management (DLM) workflows in the hosted version of Team foundation Server (TFS) in Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) . If you are doing your database development in SSMS, you can use a mix of tools to set up the functionality in VSTS. Jason Crease demonstrates how to build and deploy a simple database into the test environment using SQL CI, SQL Source Control, Octopus Deploy, tSQLt, SQL Cop and SQL Release, all with the minimum of hassle and effort.
Five Online Database Modelling Services
To design, or redesign, a database of any complexity, the Entity-Relationship modelling tool becomes essential. The specialized tools that have dominated the industry for a long while are expensive and are installed on a workstation. Now that browser technology has progressed so rapidly, the online database modelling tools have become viable and are starting to attract the attention of database designers. Are they good enough to use now? Robert Sheldon finds out.
Building Better Software
Steve Jones discusses the idea of building software better, and why that's a challenge for many of us.
Find a String in a String in SQL Server
Learn how you can find data in a string and extract it, no matter where it's located.
Getting Started with JSON Support in SQL Server 2016 – Part 2
Arshad Ali talks about using OPENJSON to read and parse JSON data and looks at how to convert it to tabular format.
The Slack Integration
Slack has become a popular phenomenon in the technical world, especially for software developers. Should we join in?
Disabling SQL Server Optimizer Rules with QUERYRULEOFF
Daniel Farina shows how to disable the optimizer rules by using QUERYRULEOFF, an undocumented hint.
The Data Driven Event
In a couple of days, Microsoft is holding Data Driven, an event that will highlight SQL Server 2016.
Blogs
Runing tSQLt Tests with Claude
By Ed Elliott
Running tSQLt unit tests is great from Visual Studio but my development workflow...
Getting Your Data GenAI-Ready: The Next Stage of Data Maturity
By James Serra
I remember a meeting where a client’s CEO leaned in and asked me, “So,...
Learn Better: Pause to Review More
By Brian Kelley
If you want to learn better, pause more in your learning to intentionally review.
Forums
The Long Name
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Eight Minutes
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T-SQL in SQL Server 2025: Fuzzy String Search I
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Question of the Day
The Long Name
I run this code to create a table:
When I check the length, I get these results:
A table name is limited to 128 characters. How does this work?