(Thomas LaRock) Last week I received an email from my friend Mike Walsh (blog | @mike_walsh), who commented on the look and feel of this blog as well as the general content. Mike and I have been friends for more than 10 years now so it’s safe to say “he knew me when”.

(Andrew Jackson) Backups are evidently a DBAs foremost approach when caught in a critical crisis condition. However, there are instances where responding to corruption is a part of dealing with it besides just leaving the server in the affected state and restoring from a backup.

(Charlie Pyne) Recently I delivered a demo on Policy Based Management for a customer. To show this off well, I really wanted to have a larger number of SQL servers to show how PBM can be used to manage SQL Server sprawl.

(Hemantgiri S. Goswami) Since data consistency is a crucial aspect for every user, the server has in-built mechanism which helps to maintain the data consistency at every step. Sometimes, the user may face SQL Server Error 824 while making any SQL query or data modification.

(Chris Yates) There is greatness within you whether you believe it or not. Over the years there are certain skills that have helped me along the way that, in turn, may help you along your journey.

(Uwe Ricken) You should stick to using tables in SQL Server, rather than heaps that have no clustered index, unless you have well-considered reasons to choose heaps. However, there are uses for heaps in special circumstances, and it is useful to know what these uses are, and when you should avoid he

(Chris Webb) One slightly frustrating feature of Power BI is that some of the cool stuff you can do in M code for loading data, and which works in Power BI Desktop (and in Power Query), causes errors when you try to refresh your dataset after it has been published to PowerBI.com.

(Dave Ballantyne) One of the most popular questions on forums / SO etc is, “How can i find out who dropped a table, truncated a table, dropped a procedure….” etc. Im sure we have all been there, something changes ( maybe schema or data ) and we have no way of telling who did it and when.

(Dennes Torres) One result of having the correct care with the access permissions in our databases is the need to avoid the DBO permission even to the users responsible for the database model.

(Rajendra Gupta) As seen in this previous tip, SQL Server 2016 Extended Events Detailed Backup Information, we can get a lot of insight for database backup operations and troubleshooting. Similarly SQL Server 2016 also provides Extended Events for database restores too, which we will explore in thi