(Manvendra Singh) Last week I was installing a SQL Server 2014 standalone instance. I did all the prerequisites and then started installing SQL Server. I did not get any warnings or errors in any of the rules or steps during the SQL Server installation wizard, but I got the below error at the end of

(Nakul Vachhrajani) Traditionally, sequential numbers in a database system were managed by the use of IDENTITY columns. SQL Server 2012 saw the advent of the SEQUENCE object, which can be used to generate a sequence of numeric values according to a user-defined specification.

(Jen McCown) Database snapshots have been available in SQL Server Enterprise edition in the last several versions. But if you’re lucky enough to have 2016 at work, go on and upgrade to SP1….you get extra-lucky special database snapshots in any version!

(Arun Sirpal) Sometimes when in a testing mode I do like to clear cache within my SQL database (Azure).

(Michael J. Swart) Another recap of a problem we recently tackled where we had to find out why a doomed transaction was still trying to do work. A doomed transaction is one that is about to roll back. In our case, it was caused by a rare set of circumstances:

(Grant Fritchey) The power and capabilities of Azure SQL Data Warehouse are pretty amazing. However, it’s still basically SQL Server under the covers. SQL Server still needs maintenance and one type of maintenance is keeping statistics up to date.

(Steve Endow) I recently wrote a post about a customer where Dynamics GP took 10 times longer to post a GL batch than one of my development virtual machines. So a GL batch with 1200 lines that took 6 seconds to post on my server would take 60 seconds in the customer’s environment.

(Simon Liew) Typically backup compression on a TDE enabled SQL Server database is not recommended as backup compression is not able to significantly compress the backup file. Starting with SQL Server 2016, backup compression now works well on TDE-enabled databases. This tip will describe the conditi

(Selvar) Have you ever wondered why does your Reporting Services behave in a weird way when you either try to access report manager page or open a report or open a shared data source etc. by throwing errors like:

(Chris Webb) When you’re using the Web.Contents() M function to call a web service from Power Query or Power BI, you don’t necessarily get one HTTP request each time you call the function: some caching takes place, so that if you make the same request multiple times your query won’t waste time askin