The Endless Upgrade Cycle
Steve Jones notes that security can be a reason to upgrade your systems, but it can also result in an endless cycle.
Private Cloud, What Is It and Why Do You Need It?
Even when organisations cannot make full use of public cloud for reasons of security or bandwidth limitations, many of the advantages of flexibility and rapid deployment can be made by providing a private cloud. Jaap Wesselius wonders if private clouds provide a new paradigm for enterprises.
Inspiring Change
Day 2 at the PASS Summit provides some inspiration for Steve Jones at the Women in Technology luncheon.
Demonstrating the Effects of Using Data Compression in SQL Server
How much space would compressing a particular index will save? How will this affect query performance? Derek Colley walks you through the effects of using data compression in SQL Server.
Divide and Conquer
Schemas may be largely irrelevant to small databases, where it is no trouble to assign permissions to individual objects, but they are vital for a hard working corporate database that is being actively developed and used by several applications, with thousands of objects that must be assigned the correct permission.
Is Unit Testing Important?
Testing our applications is important, but at what level do we need to test? Steve Jones talks about unit testing today, and wonders if this is prevalent for SQL Server developers.
Worst Day as a DBA Story Finalists
We asked DBAs to share their worst days. Some are funny, others tragic, many both. Here are the 5 finalists, vote for your favorite story to be THE worst day as a DBA.
Automating the Retrieval of SQL Backups from Windows Azure BLOB Storage
If your database server is in Azure, then it makes sense to do backups into Azure too. SQL Server 2014 supports backups to the cloud, and particularly well with Managed Backup. Once your backups are safely in an Azure BLOB, then what? Mike Wood takes up the story.
Automate Sliding Window Partition Maintenance: Part III
Part 3 of Hugh Scott's series on automating sliding window partitions in SQL Server using PowerShell
On Handling Dates in SQL
The handling of dates in TSQL is complex - when SQL Server was Sybase, it was forced by the lack of prevailing standards in SQL to create its own ways of processing and formatting dates and times. Joe Celko looks forward to a future when it is possible to write standard SQL date-processing code with SQL Server.
Blogs
Advice I Like: Knots
By Steve Jones
Learn how to tie a bowline knot. Practice in the dark. With one hand....
Shifting Mindsets: Why FinOps is Essential for Cloud Efficiency
By HeyMo0sh
As a DevOps practitioner, I’ve always focused on performance, scalability, and automation. But as...
March 2026 SQL Server Security Updates
By Brian Kelley
On Patch Tuesday, in addition to OS and Office security patches, Microsoft also released...
Forums
Multiple Deployment Processes
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How to Use sqlpackage to Detect Schema Drift Between Azure SQL Databases
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How to Use sqlpackage to...
Upgrading Admin Queries
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Question of the Day
Upgrading Admin Queries
I have a query from a former DBA that we run on SQL Server 2025 to check on database metadata. This query references sys.sysaltfiles. I want to refactor this code to be more modern. Which DMV should I reference instead?
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