(Taiyeb Zakir) I recently worked on a case where Merge agent was failing with this error:

(Siddharth Mehta) Portable Document Format (PDF) is one of the most prominent office document file formats apart from other formats like Word, Excel and PowerPoint and needs no introduction. Almost everyone who works with office documents would have worked with PDFs at least once.

(James Randall) One of the major selling points for Microsoft’s Azure Cosmos DB is that its a multi-model database – you can use it as a:

(Chris Webb) My posts from two weeks ago (see here and here) on using Process Monitor to troubleshoot the performance of Power Query queries made me wonder about another question: how does the performance of reading data from CSV files compare to the performance of reading data from Excel files?

(Pinal Dave) During my consultancy engagement, my client’s DBA team was installing SQL Server and getting an error. Since they know my work style, I got pulled into fixing that issue. In this blog, we would learn how to fix SQL installation error: Validation for setting ‘AGTSVCACCOUNT’ failed. Error

(Kenneth Fisher) The other day I was given a truly horribly formatted piece of SQL. Something a bit like this only worse, and with plenty of dynamic SQL.

(Grant Fritchey) In my previous Database Fundamentals post, I showed you how to use the Query Designer to build a query. That was a SELECT statement. The basic construct of all your SELECT statements will be the same.

(Maarten van de Bospoort) For a side project, I had to write a few Azure Stream Analytics queries. Not being a SQL — let alone Stream Analytics — person, it required some effort and substantial assistance. Hope it helps.

(blobeater) Just because the cloud movement is strong doesn’t mean the end of “DBA’s”, it does mean a change in skills and no doubt you will (one day) create Azure SQL Data Warehouse (DW) in Azure.

(Lindsay Moore) Running SQL Server in the cloud can be expensive, but it doesn’t have to be. These tips show you where wasteful spending happens and how to keep your database cloud bill low.