Drop and Recreate
Steve Jones notes that disasters come in all shapes and sizes, but a little prep that you might not have thought of can reduce the scale of the issues.
Debugging Natively-Compiled Stored Procedures Statements
Considering that SQL Server 2014 Natively Compiled Stored Procedures are compiled into binary code, you may have asked yourself if it's possible to monitor statement execution. In this tip Daniel Farina explains how you can monitor SQL Server Natively Compiled Stored Procedures.
The Last Job
Steve Jones contemplates employment and the future of the last job he'll have. This Friday he asks you if this might be yours.
What, when and who? Auditing 101 - Part 2
In my previous article we discussed Change Tracking which is one of the new technologies introduced by Microsoft. This article will focus on Change Data Capture.
Finding SQL Server views with (or without) a certain property
In this tip Aaron Bertrand uses SQL Server metadata queries to discover SQL Server views that have certain properties or use certain syntax.
Citizen Programmers
Steve Jones finds the Salesforce platform interesting and notes we have lots of "citizen programmers" doing work with data.
Cloud Identities versus Federated Identities in Office 365
Identities, the 'accounts' by which Cloud and Web users identify themselves, are tricky to manage, and tiresome for the users. Cloud services such as Office 365 have their main use in large organisations and so there have to be easy ways for system administrators to maintain them. Microsoft provide three alternative strategies; Cloud identities, Synced identities and federated identities. What is the differences between them, and which should you choose?
SQL Monitor Custom Metric: Excessive Virtual Log Files in Transaction Log
This metric picks up excessive counts of Virtual Log Files (VLF) in a transaction log that can lead to performance problems, including write performance, restore and recovery times. The ideal value for this metric should be less than 25; excessively high values (greater than 50) can cause high write times when writing to the transaction log.
SQL Server Survey
How do you use SQL Server, and how do you expect this to change next year? Fill in our survey, and enter a prize draw to win Amazon vouchers.
Blogs
A New Word: los vidados
By Steve Jones
los vidados – n. the half-remembered acquaintances you knew years ago, who you might...
In-Person CISA Training – April 13-16, 2026
By Brian Kelley
I will be leading an in-person Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) exam prep class...
EightKB 2026
EightKB is back again for 2026! The biggest online SQL Server internals conference is...
Forums
query to track time spent on individual tasks in SSIS
Hi everyone I am looking at building a query to determine how much time...
SQL Server Transactional Replication from Always On Availability Groups to Azure SQL Database
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server Transactional Replication from...
Hidden Heroes
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Hidden Heroes
Question of the Day
Identities and Sequences I
When thinking of the Identity property for auto incrementing columns and sequences for the same action, which are explicitly linked to increment a number in a table when a new row is added?
See possible answers