Automating Red Gate SQL Compare with MSSQL Server Agent
How to compare two databases and email the results to every one who needs to know
Stuck in a Rut
What do people do when their job doesn't require a lot of technical skills? Steve Jones has a few thoughts.
Data Mining Part 19: Excel and Data Mining, Samples, Queries
This lesson explains how to Clean Data, Explore Data, get Samples of Data, Classify and query a Data Mining Model.
Data Mining Part 19: Excel and Data Mining, Samples, Queries
This lesson explains how to Clean Data, Explore Data, get Samples of Data, Classify and query a Data Mining Model.
Triple Digits
Salaries for data professionals have risen quite a bit, according to the latest salary survey. That's good for those of us working with SQL Server.
Data Is Crazier than You Think
As a society, we have an unrealistic respect for data, especially if it has a decimal point somewhere and uses metric units. We who are in the business of data need to cultivate a renewed interest in the sceptical and rigorous science of statistics: it is too important to leave to 'Data Scientists'. If the data is wrong, or the way we analyse or report it is misleading, much of what we do is pointless.
SQL Monitor Custom Metric: Average I/O Stalls
This metric is a great general indicator of performance problems. High stall times indicate I/O problems, which can be attributed to busy physical disks or queries that return large data sets to the client.
Dynamically change background color in SSRS reports using custom code
This article demonstrates the use of custom code and cell expressions referencing that custom code to toggle the background color of groups of rows in an SSRS report based upon value-changes in one of the fields.
Managers: who needs them?
Managers, look away now. Patrick Index wants to get something off his chest...
Preparing Your Enterprise for Big Data
Big data applications are now fairly commonplace in large organizations. It is, however, difficult to simply ‘drop’ these applications into an existing IT infrastructure and expect to run smoothly. In addition to energy and cooling requirements for new hardware to support the new big data application, other IT areas need to prepare.
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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