Since the release of SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1 in April 2009, it has been possible to install SQL Server with media that includes the latest patches, whether they be Service Packs (for SQL…
(This post was updated on 5 February 2022.) Tempting headline, isn’t it? It might even seem like clickbait, but that’s not the intention. The SQL Server default configuration is not recommended for production environments, and…
On Monday of this week, Microsoft announced changes to the servicing model for SQL Server, starting with SQL Server 2017. From today onward, we can expect to see the following during the first five years…
Some time ago we started a new series here, called Database Fundamentals. The very first post in that series asked what a database is. One of the major announcements at Ignite last month was that…
On Monday 24 September 2018, Microsoft announced a slew of stuff at their annual Ignite conference that is going to make life a lot more interesting for many people all over the world. There’s a…
The Azure cloud platform lost a data centre for a number of hours recently due to inclement weather. This affected many customers — including Microsoft’s own services — for almost an entire day. Given that…
Fellow Canadian Doran Douglas brought this issue to my attention recently, and I wanted to share it with you as well. Let’s say you have a file in UTF-8 format. What this means is that…
Continuing the series on dates and times in SQL Server and Azure SQL Database, this week we look at the hint AT TIME ZONE. In Azure SQL Database, the regional settings of the database are…
A few months ago I ran into a problem after updating Visual Studio for Mac, where it would not start. The actual error message (which I retrieved from a log file) said: Extension node not…
Content warning: This is the second (and final) rebuttal essay about why someone is wrong on the Internet. It is no doubt biased. It might go into technical detail. Parts of it may be wrong.…
Content warning: This is the first of two rebuttal essays, about why someone is wrong on the Internet. It is no doubt biased. It might go into technical detail. Parts of it may be wrong.…
Shall I compare thee to Management Studio? Thou art more scriptable and consistent. Those out-of-memory errors do tend to lose hours of work. And I mean, SSMS doesn’t run from the command line. Sometimes I…
A shorter post this week, but an important one. Last week, Erik Darling commented on my post saying that we shouldn’t use SELECT *, which was both amusing and accurate. Amusing, because a number of…
Recently Brent Ozar posted a link to the PostgreSQL “Don’t do this” page, which I am shamelessly reproducing below, re-tailored for a SQL Server audience. Don’t use -P with sqlcmd sqlcmd is a cross-platform interactive…
SQL Server 2017 is supported on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Long-Term Support), however that version of Ubuntu Linux is now more than two years old, so you may be tempted to update Ubuntu to a more…