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.
Lead and Lag Functions in SQL Server 2012
Arshad Ali discusses how to use CTE and the ranking function to access or query data from previous or subsequent rows. He also shows you how to leverage the LEAD and LAG analytics functions to achieve the same result without writing a self-join query using CTE and ranking function
Holiday Struggles
The sporadic schedule of a day or two a week this holiday season has been a struggle for Steve Jones.
SSRS - Report for Stored Procedure with Multiple Values Passed
You created a report that passed three separate values to a stored procedure, simply enough. However, now the user comes back and they want the ability to select multiple values for the report to return data against. Check out this article for a walk-through on how to handle this request.
The 2014 Tribal Awards - Nominations Open
Nominations open until December 10. The Tribal Awards are back and looking to recognize some of the great contributors to the SQL community. Nominations are now open for 11 different categories, but closing soon so make sure your user group, favorite twitter account, or person who's helped you the most this year is nominated.
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;
See possible answers