Ewald Cress writes: Find a person or several people to pick on, and tell us a shareable story or two about how they have made a positive contribution in your life. I’ve known Ewald for… T-SQL Tuesday: The Contributing Factor
I love theatre. In six months I am putting on two one-act plays for a local festival, because I don’t already have enough on my plate. Security theatre, on the other hand, I don’t like.… Is Transparent Data Encryption just security theatre?
[2018-07-03 edit: The original name of this feature was XE Profiler, but it was changed to XEvent Profiler in SSMS 17.4.] I have a favourite new feature of SQL Server Management Studio 17 (SSMS), and… Gimmicks that work: XEvent Profiler in SQL Server Management Studio
This is more for my benefit in the future, but hopefully it can help someone else too. We recently had problems with a development server not installing Windows Updates. The fix was to repair the… Repair a Windows Server 2016 installation
Recently, I was asked to assist an organization with getting their data back for a SQL Server that had experienced physical hard drive failure. I asked a lot of questions about the configuration of the… The perils of RAID
In the #sqlhelp Slack channel on the SQL Server Community Slack workspace last month, Jemma Hooper asked: When trying to CAST or CONVERT a datetime2 value to binary(8), I’m getting a “binary or text data… Why is a value in DATETIME2 8 bytes, but in BINARY it is 9 bytes?
Edited on 10 October 2018: Please note that this model has changed. See Changes to the SQL Server servicing model (Cumulative Updates) for more. The updated information is below. For a few years now, Microsoft… Changes to Service Packs and Cumulative Updates for SQL Server 2017
October is a busy month for me. I am flying all over the US and Canada for speaking engagements to share some thoughts about migrating your SQL Server environment to the cloud (specifically Azure). Compañero… Compañero Conference and SQL Modernization Roadshow
I’ve been working with SQL Server for many years now, and up until recently, I assumed that rebuilding any clustered index would cause non-clustered indexes to be rebuilt as well, because the non-clustered index includes… Does rebuilding my clustered index also rebuild my non-clustered indexes?
Joe Obbish wrote an epic post a few weeks ago about loading a trillion rows into a non-partitioned table in SQL Server, using a clustered columnstore index to maximise the compression. (Short version: it’s very… A trillion and one
I got a strange request in a Slack channel the other day. A colleague in South Africa, who uses Windows, was unable to connect to our VPN (Virtual Private Network). We use the built-in VPN… Connect Windows 10 client to a VPN on Windows Server 2012 R2
Last week, I posted this statement on Twitter, along with a screen capture of the official Microsoft documentation: Reminder: Max Server Memory is *not* just for the buffer pool. The RAM limit Standard Edition can… What you need to know about memory limits on SQL Server
This coming weekend, at SQLSaturday #635 in Vancouver BC, I will be presenting a brand new talk about Temporal Tables, one of my favourite features of SQL Server 2016+ and Azure SQL Database. If you… Speaking at SQLSaturday #635 in Vancouver this weekend
For the longest time, MySQL has been the recommended database platform for blogs and other websites. It’s free. It’s available on every version of Linux, which is the most common web server platform. If you… Microsoft presents: MySQL and PostgreSQL?
I was fresh off the boat* from South Africa, working in a small computer store in an equally small town in Saskatchewan. Five days a week in winter, six days a week in summer, mainly… This is how I recovered from a catastrophic failure