Your Best Work
Interviewing people is hard to do well. Steve Jones talks about a technique that might help you better choose good employees for your organization.
Using Stored Procedures to Provide an Application’s Business-Logic Layer
When faced with a complex business application, Dwain's team chose to encapsulate and implement most of an application’s business logic in SQL Server, using an interface made up of stored procedures. Here's how they did it.
Personal Development
Steve Jones thinks that a personal development plan is important and talks today a little about how you should build one.
Guidelines for Using Natively-Compiled Stored Procedures in SSIS Packages
As you may know, SQL Server In-Memory OLTP introduced in SQL Server 2014 offers great performance improvements for ETL processes. In this tip we cover techniques you need to know about various behaviors of SQL Server In-Memory OLTP depending on the options you select.
Minimal Meetings
Too many meetings happen in software teams. Steve Jones says that when scheduling meeting, you should be aware of the cost, and only include those people that need to be there.
Templates and teamwork
SQL Server expert David Poole discusses how teams can work together and share templates in Management Studio.
Explaining The SQL Server 2014 Analysis Services Data Mining Model Lift Chart
In this tip, Dallas Snider explains how to interpret the Lift Chart found on the Mining Accuracy tab of a SQL Server 2014 Analysis Services Data Mining structure.
SSIS 2012 Projects: Deployment Configurations and Monitoring
The Project Deployment Model introduced in SSIS 2012 speeds up the deployment of database projects in which there may be hundreds of SSIS packages per project. Not only that, but deployments can be configured differently for each environments such as test and staging, and there are now ways of monitoring the status and performance of packages and of versioning the SSIS Catalog.
Blogs
Narrow Task Decomposition in AI Pipeline Agents
A nightly load into sales_fact fails. Ask an orchestrating agent to break down the...
Car Update: August 2026
By Steve Jones
It’s been some time since I provided a car update, so I decided to...
Microsoft Fabric OneLake Shortcuts: When to Use Them and When Not To
By James Serra
An architecture scenario Imagine separate Sales, Finance, Shared Data, and Executive Analytics workspaces. Sales...
Forums
Managing Incidents and Fighting Fires
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Backing Up a DMK
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The Quiet Part
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Question of the Day
Backing Up a DMK
In SQL Server 2025, I have a database with a Database Masker Key (DMK). I want to back up this key and keep a copy offline. When do I have to open this key before running the backup?
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