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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Last week we looked at ACID compliance. This week we dive a little deeper into the Isolation portion, and what it all means. Isolation levels work to manage how my transactions may be isolated from…
Relational database management systems (RDBMS) such as SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL use transactions to allow concurrent users to select, insert, update, and delete data without affecting everyone else. An RDBMS is considered ACID-compliant…
During a Q&A session I hosted at our local Calgary SQL Server User Group last month, one of the attendees mentioned an interview question he’d had and wanted to hear my thoughts. How would you…
Today’s public service announcement is a reminder to be wary of date formatting in SQL Server. On a recent mailing list discussion, one person demonstrated the following code (which I’ve adapted for this post): SET…
We can easily spend tens of thousands of dollars on core licences for SQL Server, and then we go and install the product on an operating system with the default Balanced Power Plan, which is,…
The Database Fundamentals series is now done. We started with understanding what a database is, and then spent a little time understanding how databases store text, known as collation. The next step was understanding data…
In 2017, there’s no excuse not to have at least a testing environment, and preferably a development environment as well, in order to create and deploy code changes (software, database, you name it) outside of…
My First DELETE Statement Here are the links to the previous posts in this series: My First SELECT Statement My First INSERT Statement My First UPDATE Statement This week is a much shorter post, where…