If you have ever played a game of chess against someone good, or perhaps against a computer, you know that a good player is always thinking multiple moves ahead. Being a DBA and/or a database programmer is like playing several chess games simultaneously.
2023-07-19
In this article, we look at a sample use case of how you can create SQLCMD batch files that can be interactive and reused in different SQL Server environments.
2023-07-14
The SELECT statement is used to retrieve information from a database. Following the execution of a SELECT statement, a tabular result is held in a result table (called a result set). It allows you to select the table columns depending on a set of criteria. In this article, I will introduce the basic SELECT statement fetching data from just one table.
2023-06-21
I enjoyed writing scripts to manage the servers, as it taught me a lot about the internals of SQL Server. Many of these scripts were eventually automated using SQL Server’s agent to run and save data on the different servers so we could review the results, looking for issues.
2023-05-31
SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) has been the de facto ETL tool for over 15 years for DBAs, Developers and Business Intelligence Professionals to extract, transform and load data (i.e. ETL tasks) for specific business processes, data-centric applications, data warehousing, reporting and data exchange between organizations. SSIS is a great product with high adoption across the globe, but has some limitations related to modern data sources, performance and streamlining tedious tasks. How can we overcome these limitations and have SSIS provide greater value?
2023-04-10
DBAs must make sure data is highly available, and there are many SQL Server high availability options. Pamela Mooney discusses those options in this article.
2021-06-07
Create a quick application that stores your favorite queries that you can use to quickly connect to any server and return the results.
2021-03-08
In this article of the series, Pamela Mooney explains the architecture of SQL Server under the hood, including some query anti-patterns to avoid.
2021-02-23
In this article, I am going to explain fixing a problem related login failure error with SQL Server. The Problem One of the common error in the SQL Server error log is "Login failed for user 'DomainName\ServerName$'. Reason: Could not find a login matching the name provided. [CLIENT: <local machine>]". Even though it says that […]
2025-12-31 (first published: 2020-11-24)
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By Steve Jones
I had an idea for an animated view of a sales tool, and started...
Next Monday, February 9, 2026, my one-day live online training SQL Server Query Tuning...
By Steve Jones
One of the features we advocates have been advocating for is a better way...
I am creating shared datasets that our executive staff can use for creating reports...
I am creating shared datasets that our executive staff can use for creating reports...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Delta Lake: The Definitive Guide:...
In SQL Server 2025, what is returned from this code:
DECLARE @message VARCHAR(50) = 'Hello SQL Server 2025!'; DECLARE @encoded VARCHAR(MAX); SET @encoded = BASE64_ENCODE(CAST(@message AS VARBINARY(1000))); SELECT BASE64_DECODE(@encoded)See possible answers