SQL Prompt Tips #7 - Begin End Highlighting
This SQL Prompt tip shows you how code highlighting makes it easier to find which items match up with each other.
COALESCE in SQL Server
Sandeep Mittal provides an introduction to the COALESCE function and shows how to use it.
Hadoop many flavors of SQL
What are the most popular SQL implementations for Hadoop? How different are they from T-SQL?
The Biggest Data Breach (For Now)
JP Morgan suffers the largest data breach for a financial institution, but Steve Jones doesn't think this record will stand for long.
Azure SQL Database - Transparent Data Encryption
Transparent Data Encryption offers the ability to encrypt content of the database, its transaction logs, as well as backups while at rest. Encryption and decryption are performed in real-time, at the individual page level, as the database is being written to and read from storage, without necessitating changes to applications accessing their data. Marcin Policht reviews the feature.
Getting ready for Hadoop
Before adopting Hadoop into your organisation there are a number of factors to consider. This article highlights some of the key points.
SQL Server Heaps, and Their Fragmentation
In SQL Server, heaps are rightly treated with suspicion. Although there are rare cases where they perform well, they are likely to be the cause of poor performance. If a table is likely to have a large number of changes, then it can become fragmented due to way that space is allocated and forward pointers used. How does one detect this problem? Is it significant? How does one deal with it, if necessary? Neeraj Tripathi explains.
Early Adopters
Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren that looks at those that run software early in its lifecycle.
Using SQL Prompt to Accelerate the Top 10 Most Common Database Scripts
There may be some people who enjoy repetitive typing, but Grant Fritchey doesn't. He's always preferred SQL Prompt. The standard snippets suit developers fine but aren't so DBA-oriented, so he set about asking the SQLServerCentral community what they typed in the most, and set about producing a set of DBA snippets with the results.
Blogs
Funny Money: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
While wandering around the documentation looking for some Question of the Day topics, I...
Why Database AI Agents need Layers?
By Arun Sirpal
Third part in my Ai series with databases. When building AI solutions within the...
Un-Migrating From the Cloud: T-SQL Tuesday #199
By Steve Jones
This month we have a very interesting invitation from Koen Verbeeck. He has hosted...
Forums
How Do the Experts Become Experts?
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How Do the Experts Become...
Stairway to Reliable Database Deployments Level 4 – Preparing for Production Deployment
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Stairway to Reliable Database Deployments...
Secure Communications
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Secure Communications
Question of the Day
Secure Communications
As of June 2026, what is the best version of TLS to use with SQL Server?
See possible answers