(lukaseder) The SQL language has one great advantage over procedural, object oriented, and “ordinary” functional programming languages. The fact that it is truly declarative (i.e. a 4GL / fourth generation programming language) means that a sophisticated optimiser can easily transform one SQL expres

(Thomas LaRock) You want to know if a job inside of SQL Server Agent is running longer than it should. This leads to a second problem: how do you define “long”? Well, for me, I use math.

(Paul White) Searching string data for an arbitrary substring match can be an expensive operation in SQL Server. Queries of the form Column LIKE ‘%match%’ cannot use the seeking abilities of a b-tree index, so the query processor has to apply the predicate to each row individually.

(Pinal Dave) One of my clients reported an interesting issue and I was needed to wear detective cap to solve it. The mystery, for which they hired me was as below for Database Files Initial Size Changing Automatically.

(Murshed Zaman_AzureCAT) We often get questions from customers related to Azure SQL DW being a good fit for moving a particular database to the cloud. Some of the typical questions are:

(Pinal Dave) Many companies do hardening of servers to make sure they are protected from any known vulnerabilities. It is important to test all the application in test server before doing hardening. Let us learn about how to fix Eventlog Service not starting.

(Arun Sirpal) Scaling up and down your SQL Database is something that is quite common to do. I want to discuss the impact of moving up and down tiers, in terms of your transactions and connections.

(Kenneth Fisher) A while back I did a post about creating an empty table using a SELECT statement. Basically doing something like this:

(Grant Fritchey) Capturing query execution metrics is much easier now that you can see the runtime metrics in execution plans when you’re using SQL Server 2016 SP1 or better in combination with SQL Server Management Studio 2017.

(Pinal Dave) Question: How to Clear Plan Cache with Scoped Configuration?