(Kenneth Fisher) A co-worker showed me a really neat trick the other day. We deal with a lot of connection problems and one of the first places I look is the connection string.

(Grant Fritchey) The question that came up during a recent class I was teaching was: What if you have a plan guide to get the plan you want, but then decide, instead of using the plan guide, you’ll just force the plan?

(Bob Dorr) SQL Server Books Online documents Instant File Initialization and the associated security considerations. This blog highlights the underlying file system implementations and differences in behavior between Windows and Linux.

(blobeater) If you decide to use IP addresses to control what services have access to your Azure SQL Database, then understanding firewall rules are important.

(Jason Brimhall) Knowing just how long an event takes is a common requirement when troubleshooting. Sometimes, figuring out the unit of time is a bit troublesome. Is it milliseconds, seconds or microseconds?

(Denny Cherry) There’s been a lot of discussions recently about SQL Agent jobs, proxy accounts, and job ownership. I wanted to try and clarify some of the myths out there, including job ownership and permissions.

(Pinal Dave) Though I mainly focus on SQL Server Performance Tuning as my primary consulting engagement, there are moments when I am asked questions from my regular clients which are not related to SQL Server Performance and they still expect me to answer.

(Ricardo Niepel) The cost of all Azure Cosmos DB database operations is normalized and expressed in terms of Request Units (RUs). RU/s is a rate-based currency, which abstracts the system resources such as CPU, IOPS, and memory that are required.

(Ben Martens) The first is the ability to define functions. Ad-hoc investigations are regularly performed with straight queries, but anytime we create something useful and/or want to share with others, we create a function.

(Melissa Coates) A Power BI administrator is a role for managing various aspects of the Power BI Service. This role can be assigned in Office 365. Anyone with Office 365 global admin privileges is also a Power BI administrator by default.