One Rule, Umpteen Constraints
Despite being deprecated for many years, Phil Factor explains why RULEs are still hanging on in there in SQL Server 2014.
Identifying and Solving Index Scan Problems
When you're developing database applications, it pays to check for index scans in the SQL Server query plan cache. Once you've identified the queries, what next? Dennes Torres gives some preliminary guidelines on how to find out why these index scans are being chosen for these queries and how to make the queries run faster and more efficiently.
Cumulative sum of previous rows
I had an update statement that took 3 minutes to run after this code change it took 6 seconds.
Azure Blob Storage Part 9: Shared Access Signatures
In this article, Robin Shahan talks about security and how to control access to containers and blobs using shared access signatures (SAS) and stored access policies.
Efficiency
This Friday Steve Jones asks about how you are tackling your career growth as you get older. Are you getting more efficient?
Self-maintaining, Contiguous Effective Dates in Temporal Tables
'Temporal' tables contain facts that are valid for a period of time. When they are used for financial information they have to be very well constrained to prevent errors getting in and causing incorrect reporting. This makes them more difficult to maintain. Is it possible to have both the stringent constraints and simple CRUD operations? Well, yes. Dwain Camps patiently explains the whole process.
SQL Saturday #372 - Exeter, UK
SQL Saturday, organized by SQL South West, is coming to Exeter, England on April 25. This is sure to be a special event, and as always, offers a free day of training and networking. Register while space is available.
Exploding the Myths of Big Data
As big data application success stories (and failures) have appeared in the news and technical publications, several myths have emerged about big data. This article explores a few of the more significant myths, and how they may negatively affect your own big data implementation.
Are There That Many GUIDs?
Steve Jones talks about a recent survey that showed more people use GUIDs as primary keys than identity values.
Identifying Start Dates not Aligned with End Dates on a Prior Row
When effective end dates don't align properly with effective start dates for subsequent rows, what are you to do?
Blogs
Flyway Tips: AI Generating Migration Script Names
By Steve Jones
AI is a big deal in 2026, and at Redgate, we’re experimenting with how...
The Book of Redgate: Get the right stuff done
By Steve Jones
Another of our values: The facing page has this quote: “We admire people who...
Runing tSQLt Tests with Claude
By Ed Elliott
Running tSQLt unit tests is great from Visual Studio but my development workflow...
Forums
No Defaults Passwords Ever
Comments posted to this topic are about the item No Defaults Passwords Ever
Introduction of OPTIMIZE_FOR_SEQUENTIAL_KEY = ON
Hi, We have low latency high volume system. I have a table having 3...
The Long Name
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Long Name
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?