Office 365 Essentials - Subscriptions and Licenses
Should you be planning to move from Exchange to Office 365? If so, why? What sort of license should you get, and should you use cloud identities or federated identities for your users?
Stairway to T-SQL DML Level 12: Using the MERGE Statement
The final level of this stairway looks at the MERGE statement in detail, focusing on how to perform insert, update and delete logic using the MERGE statement.
Yet Another Attack Vector
The lack of progress in amending our laws to handle the digital revolution in our leaves may leave us open to unexpected attacks.
Quickly Investigating What's in the Tables of SQL Server Databases
From SQL Server Management Studio it's hard to look through the first few rows of a whole lot of tables in a database. This is odd, since it is a great way to get quickly familiar with a database. Phil tidied up a SQL routine he uses to investigate databases quickly in a browser. He explains how to use it, how it works, and how to use it from PowerShell.
How to configure SSL encryption in SQL Server
Tibor Nagy explains how to configure Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption on our SQL Servers, with a trusted certificate.
SQL Monitor Custom Metric: Out of memory errors
The number of out of memory errors that have occurred within a rolling five minute window. If you just want to keep an eye out for any memory errors, you can watch the ring buffers for the Out of memory errors alert when it gets registered there.
Automate Your Central Management Server Registrations
Easily register SQL Servers in your inventory to your CMS for easy multi-server queries.
Disconnecting Auditing
Currently we have system administrators responsible for securing our systems, including the auditing capabilities. However that's not the best way to ensure that we can protect our systems.
The Broad View
An ingenuous use of existing data leads to the thought - when are we so deep in our work that we can't see how to improve?
Common database deployment blockers and Continuous Delivery headaches
Deployability is now a first class concern for databases, so why isn’t it as easy as it should be? Matthew Skelton explores seven of the most common challenges which will bring your database deployments to their knees.
Blogs
A Last Minute Trip to the EU
By Steve Jones
My life has some crazy travel stretches for sure. Between speaking, office visits, customer...
Part 3 of 3: Tuning DiskANN — R, Alpha, L, Beam Width, Recall and Latency
In Part 1, we saw how ‘Vamana’ represents vectors as nodes, connects them with...
Automated SQL Server Benchmarking with HammerDB and Docker: A Complete Testing Framework
I’m excited to announce the release of a new open-source project that fully automates...
Forums
Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in SQL Server 2025: Fixing the Kitchen-Sink Search Procedure
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in...
AI Experience Gap that we keep talking about
Comments posted to this topic are about the item AI Experience Gap that we...
Question of the Day
ORDER BY alias
There is a table tmp_tab:
CREATE TABLE tmp_tab ( id int, val int );
INSERT INTO tmp_tab VALUES (1, 1), (2, NULL), (3, 3), (4, 4), (5, 5);You want to order the rows ids by the following expression:
ISNULL(val, id) + 1Which of the following queries produces the expected ordering and why? (Select all correct) See possible answers