What’s new in SQL Server 2025 CTP 2.0
Three years ago, when the first public preview of SQL Server 2022 (CTP 2.0) was announced, I was a few months in at the SQL Docs team, and had very little to do with that…
Join me in Germany in June
I have been selected to speak at the DataGrillen conference later this year. I will be presenting my session How Does SQL Server Store That Data Type?, which I debuted during last year’s EightKB online conference. This…
Be careful with table updates
The dire warning in the subject line is not meant to scare you. Rather, it is advice that is going to be useful to those of us who need to audit changes to a database.…
Join me at the EightKB virtual conference on 28 July 2021
Next week on Wednesday 28 July 2021, I will be presenting a brand-new session titled “How SQL Server stores that data type” for the free EightKB virtual conference. I’ve made it a 500-level talk, as…
A quick primer on binary and hexadecimal
A few years ago, I wrote that a CPU is “a hot mess of on-off switches.” There’s more to it than that when you get into the weeds of caches and cores and logic gates,…
How SQL Server stores data types: sql_variant
This post looks at a curious data type that isn’t really a data type. Instead, sql_variant tries to be all things to all people. As with most things in life, it has a few shortcomings…
How SQL Server stores data types: XML
This week we’re looking at how the database engine stores the XML data type in SQL Server and Azure SQL Database. If you would like to read about storage of other data types, here are the…
The final word on storage for DATETIME2
Two years ago I wrote a post that got a lot of traction in the comments at the time. Last month there was renewed interest because one of the commenters noted that the official SQL…
Canada Day 2020
It’s Canada Day here, the commemoration of the country’s confederation in 1867. Given events over the last few months such as the worldwide pandemic, followed by a number of politically-motivated movements for change across the…
How should I store currency values in SQL Server?
On Twitter, Michael Dyrynda writes: ⚠️ Never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever…
How SQL Server stores data types: money
In this post we look at how SQL Server stores currency values using the MONEY and SMALLMONEY data types. If you’d like to read the previous posts in this series of how SQL Server stores…
How SQL Server stores data types: integers and decimals
This week we’re going to look at how numbers are stored. This post will cover integers (TINYINT, SMALLINT, INT, BIGINT), and decimals (DECIMAL, which is the same as NUMERIC). If you’d like to read the…
Negative identity values don’t suck
A quick(er) post this week, in response to Greg Low’s blog post from a few weeks ago titled “Don’t start identity columns or sequences with large negative values.” Greg writes that you shouldn’t use large…
The XML data type is not immutable
Immutability In many programming languages, strings of text are immutable, meaning they don’t change. When you modify a string, a new string is created in memory by copying the original. The old string stays in…
The easy way to handle UTF-8 in a .NET application when dealing with SQL Server 2019
A short post this week. On a mailing list recently, someone noticed that a .NET application writing to SQL Server did not have the expected behaviour with UTF-8 collation and data types. To refresh our…