The Office
Would you be more productive outside of an office? Would you take a pay cut to work outside of an office? Steve Jones notes that a number of IT professionals said they would.
The SQL of the Feast Days of Western Christendom
Phil Factor's newest SQL expression calculates when all the feasts and saints days are, giving you plenty of potential causes for celebration.
Copy a database between servers with one command
This tool is a helper for your daily work to copy easily databases between Servers/instances and do all the necessary stuff for you.
Gratitude
Today we have a guest editorial from Erin Stellato that reminds us that we have had support from many, and it's important to thank them from time to time.
The SQL Server 2016 Query Store: Overview and Architecture
SQL Server's Query Store, introduced in SQL Server 2016, helps to troubleshoot query performance by capturing a range of information about query usage, CPU, memory consumption, I/O and execution time, and retaining every Execution Plan for analysis. Much of this information is available through queries. It looks set to be the most significant enhancement of SQL Server 2016 - Enrico van de Laar explores.
What is DevOps?
The DevOps moniker seems to bring together good practices that some companies have followed for years. However lots don't, and today Steve Jones tries to get inspire a few of you to give it a try.
Converting and Formatting Numbers Using the M Language
Power BI designer is based upon the Power Query formula language informally known as "M". Unfortunately, the advanced editor inside the Power BI designer does not support syntax highlighting, meaning it can be easy to make mistakes. Matt Mason shows how you can extend the Notepad++ editor to support this feature.
Rethinking Hiring
Today Steve Jones looks at the problems we have with hiring staff and the troubles we go through. Perhaps we can do better with an investment in our people.
MySQL Pattern Matching using Regular Expressions
In this follow-up to Beyond the LIKE Operator: Advanced Pattern Matching with MySQL, Rob Gravelle shows how to use the REGEXP operator to match alphanumeric characters, explores the role of meta-characters, and compares standard regular expression syntax to that of MySQL.
Blogs
Identity Columns Can’t Be Updated: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
I’m not sure I knew identity column values could not be updated. I ran...
Rolling Back a Broken Release
By Steve Jones
We had an interesting discussion about deployments in databases and how you go forward...
A bespoke reporting solution doesn’t have to cost the earth
By ChrisJenkins
You could be tolerating limited reporting because there isn’t an off the shelf solution...
Forums
Can someone please explain what happens?
I have mentioned this several times over several years. Can someone please help me...
SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT) returns null when nothing is found instead of 0
SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT Component) AS Found FROM tblComponents WHERE(Component NOT LIKE '%[a-z]%') AND(LTRIM(RTRIM(Component)) = 'GM13622')...
Remotely Engineer Fabric Lakehouse objects: The Fabric Modern Data Platform
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Remotely Engineer Fabric Lakehouse objects:...
Question of the Day
Creating JSON III
In a SQL Server 2025 table, called Beer, I have this data:
BeerIDBeerName 1Becks 2Fat Tire 3Mac n Jacks 4Alaskan Amber 8KirinI run this code:
SELECT JSON_OBJECTAGG(
BeerID: BeerName )
FROM beer;
What are the results? See possible answers