(Nakul Vachhrajani) On one of the forums, I encountered an interesting question the other day. The person asking the query had a table which had integers, null values and blank strings.

(Derik Hammer) With all of the high-availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) features, the database administrator must understand how much data loss and downtime is possible under the worst case scenarios. Data loss affects your ability to meet recovery point objectives (RPO) and downtime affect

(Daniel Mellor) It’s time for another SQL Server refresher today! This time we will discuss some storage basics, specifically Pages and Extents and how they relate to each other. There are a lot of resources out there discussing these storage units, but I’ve tried to put my own spin on things and ag

(Kenneth Fisher) Monday Bob Ward (b/t) announced on twitter that the new Data Migration Assistant had been released.

(Michael Otey) Microsoft Azure SQL Database compatibility problems disappeared in V12, clearing the path for a SQL database migration to the cloud. Here’s how to make the move.

(Paul White) Generally speaking, the best kind of Sort is one that is avoided completely. With careful indexing and sometimes some creative query writing, we can often remove the need for a Sort operator from execution plans. Where the data to be sorted is large, avoiding this kind of Sort can produ

(Hari Yadav) Master Data Services (MDS) is Microsoft’s platform for supporting Master Data Management (MDM). A system like MDS, if properly maintained, gives organisations a powerful alternative to increasingly having to centralize databases as a way of preventing data from getting out sync or becom

(sqlkris) A cross join is used when you wish to create combination of every row from two tables. All row combinations are included in the result; this is commonly called cross product join. A common use for a cross join is to create obtain all combinations of items, such as colors and sizes.

(Kenneth Fisher) There has been a long standing debate over the use of a natural primary key vs an artificial one. I thought I would throw in my two cents.

(Nakul Vachhrajani) Working with complex queries (those that have more than a handful of joins), one of the things that is difficult for novice developers is to keep track of where they are and which objects have already been referenced on the query.