(Hannes du Preez) The SQL MINUS operator makes use of two SQL statements. It takes all the results from the first statement and subtracts out the ones that are present in the second statement to get the final answer.

(Denny Cherry) You moved your critical infrastructure to the cloud. You’re now relying on the cloud for 100% of your customer facing systems. Did the sales person from your cloud provider tell you that you didn’t need DR any more because you are relying on their rock solid infrastructure? Did you

(Arun Sirpal) Question – Can you detach a corrupt database? Answer – IT DEPENDS!

(Melissa Coates) I’ve spent a lot of time this past year learning about and thinking about data lakes. Mostly I’ve been interested in how to integrate a data lake alongside existing investments without making a mess of things.

(Robert Sheldon) Execution plans explain all you need to know about query performance, and how to fine-tune. Sure, you can see them in SSMS, but what if you need to drill into to the important details? What about using DMVs, Extended Events or SET statements to get at the execution plans?

(JackLi) Recently we got a call from customer who was trying to enable stretch database but repeatedly got errors like below:

(Pinal Dave) I was recently asked if I know the fastest way to export data from SQL Server table. This was very interesting question personally, as I have not run any such tests in the past. However, everytime when I had to export data, I have used in past BCP command line utility and I have found i

(Nakul Vachhrajani) I have been working with SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) recently. In many ways, SSIS is counter-intuitive if you have been working with the database engine for long (more than a decade in my case).

(Grant Fritchey) The way that you format T-SQL code can affect the productivity of the people who have to subsequently maintain your work. It is never a good experience to see SQL Code, cry out “Who the devil wrote this code?”, and then realise that it was you.

(Tim Radney) One of the first aspects of moving your database to Azure SQL Database is to check for compatibility and Microsoft gives you numerous ways to do this for Azure SQL Database V12 (hereafter referred to as just ‘V12’). One of these methods is using SQL Server Data Tools for Visual Studio (