SQL Server Management Studio v17.0
Version numbers are confusing. SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), the client user interface by which most DBAs access SQL Server, was decoupled from the server product for SQL Server 2016. For the last 18 months…
SQL Server 2017 Announced
By now you will have heard that the next version of SQL Server has been announced. There’s no release date yet, but Brent Ozar seems to think it’ll be before June. There are many new features,…
Upcoming SQLSaturdays in Alberta, Canada
Taking a short break from the Database Fundamentals series of the last few weeks, I’d like to mention some upcoming PASS community events in the province of Alberta. I will be presenting at SQLSaturday #594…
So, like, what is a byte?
A friend of mine in the filmmaking business, who is exceedingly bright but has never worked with SQL Server before, was reading through the first five posts of this Database Fundamentals series, and asked a great question:…
Normalization, The Sequel
If there’s one thing that SQL Server is really good at, it’s relationships. After all, a relational database management system without the relationships is nothing more than a place to store your stuff. Last week…
A First Look At Normalization
Phew! There’s a lot to take in with data types, collation, precision, scale, length, and Unicode, and we’re just getting warmed up. This week’s post is over 2,000 words long!
Over the last three weeks, we’ve gone fairly deep into data types, and now we are going to see how they come into play with normalization.
If we go back to the first post in this series, I mentioned normalization, and then apparently I forgot about it in the next two posts. What you didn’t see is that I was talking about it all along.
Fundamentals of Data Types
Last week, we discussed storing text in a database. This week we will dive deeper into data types. When storing data in our database, we want to make sure that it’s stored accurately and that…
Data Types and Collation
Last week we started with a very simple definition of a database: a discrete set of information, with a specific structure and order to it. We briefly looked at normalization, which is a way to…
What is a Database?
What is Microsoft SQL Server? To answer that, we have to ask what a relational database management server (RDBMS) is. To answer that, we have to ask what a relational database is. To answer that,…
Max Server Memory and SQL Server 2016 Service Pack 1
(This post was last updated on 1 August 2022.) Everything changed for SQL Server Standard Edition on 16 November 2016, and how memory limits work. On that day, a slew of Enterprise Edition features made…
SQL Modernization and Cloud Migration Talk in Calgary
On 28 February 2017, I will be speaking at Microsoft Calgary as part of a roadshow for AMTRA Solutions. Lunch will be provided. You can reserve your place for my session on Eventbrite, and there…
Testing for Object Existence: CREATE OR ALTER
For the longest time, T-SQL writers have had to wrestle with ways of testing for an object’s existence so that it can either be dropped and recreated, or modified as needed. Last week we covered…
Testing for Object Existence: DROP … IF EXISTS
For the longest time, T-SQL writers have had to wrestle with ways of testing for an object’s existence so that it can either be dropped and recreated, or modified as needed. This is especially common…
Configuration Manager Shortcut on Windows 10 and Server 2016
(Last updated 2020-01-07) This is more for my own reference than anything. On newer versions of Windows desktop and Windows Server, we may find that the shortcut to SQL Server Configuration Manager is missing. According…
Temporal Tables and Hidden Period Columns
In my November 2015 post, An Introduction to Temporal Tables in SQL Server 2016 using a DeLorean, I wrote: The HIDDEN property is optional and will hide these columns from a standard SELECT statement for…