Kitchen Culture
Today Andy Warren talks about an employee work item that many of you might not be tasked with.
Linked lists
Learn how you can achieve better performance with linked list instead of a numbering column.
What counts for a DBA: Responsibility
Whose fault is it if a database is hacked and its contents appear on a hacker’s site? Louis Davidson suggests that, regardless of limitations, the DBA always bears some responsibility.
Using the MERGE Statement to Perform an UPSERT
The term UPSERT has been coined to refer to an operation that inserts rows into a table if they don’t exist, otherwise they are updated. To perform the UPSERT operation Microsoft introduced the MERGE statement. Not only does the MERGE statement support the UPSERT concept, but it also supports deleting records. Greg Larsen discusses how to use the MERGE statement to UPDATE, INSERT and DELETE records from a target table.
What, when and who? Auditing 101 - Part 3
Who messed around with my database? Auditing 101. In this article we will take a look at another technique available in SQL 2008 and higher. This new technique is SQL Audit.
SQL Server Analysis Services Attribute Relationships
This tip looks at some of the questions around attribute relationships in SQL Server Analysis Services, including why you need them, how to create them, and the common data sets involved.
GUIDs GUIDs everywhere, but how is my data unique?
After having seen many systems that use GUIDs as the primary key for every table, it is time to say enough is enough.
Questions About T-SQL Transaction Isolation Levels You Were Too Shy to Ask
Every time you access a relational database to make a query, you have an important decision to make: What is the appropriate isolation level for your query? If you get this wrong, the consequences can be serious. Deadlocks, Dirty reads, Non-repeatable reads, or poor performance. We're in luck, because Robert Sheldon once more answers those questions that are awkward to ask in public.
Blogs
Future IT Roles – Agentic Architect and AI Boom!!
By Vinay Thakur
These days everything is changing to AI World, IT roles are getting changed and...
Free Webinar about Columnstore Indexes
I’m doing a small series on indexing basics for SQL Server, and on May...
PlanTrace: Stop Reading Redshift EXPLAIN Plans. Start Seeing Them
PlanTrace: Stop Reading Redshift EXPLAIN Plans. Start Seeing Them Introducing PlanTrace — a free, browser-based...
Forums
SPAM Issues May 2026
We suffered a SPAM attack from May 1-6, which unfortunately corresponded with time off...
SQL Password enforcing
Hi to all We have situation at a client where someone is illegally changing...
SQL Password enforcing
Hi to all We have situation at a client where someone is illegally changing...
Question of the Day
Creating a JSON Document III
I have this data in a table called dbo.NFLTeams
TeamID TeamName City YearEstablished ------ -------- ---- --------------- 1 Cowboys Dallas 1960 2 Eagles Philadelphia 1933 3 Packers Green Bay 1919 4 Chiefs Kansas City 1960 5 49ers San Francisco 1946 6 Broncos Denver 1960 7 Seahawks Seattle 1976 8 Patriots New England 1960If I run this code, how many rows are returned?
SELECT TOP 2
json_objectagg('Team' : TeamName)
FROM dbo.NFLTeams;
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