(Ashish Kumar Mehta) SQL Server 2016, currently available in preview versions, comes with many new features, including a variety of enhancements to Transact-SQL (T-SQL), Microsoft’s extension of the standard SQL programming language.

(Sean McCown) I’ve been hearing it more and more the past year. “XP_cmdshell should always be turned off.” “Whatever you do, don’t turn on XP_cmdshell!” “We can’t do that, it requires XP_cmdshell!” “You’ll fail your audit if XP_cmdshell is turned on.” And all the other variations.

(Marcin Policht) In one of our articles recently published on this forum, we have described the basic characteristics of Azure SQL Database elastic database jobs. As we pointed out, their name is somewhat misleading, since it implies that they are intended specifically for Elastic Database pools.

(Chris Webb) Some time ago I wrote the following post on how to work out how long your M query takes to execute in Power Query:

(Derik Hammer) Some people advocate we should count by twelve rather than ten. This is because you can easily count the twelve segments of your fingers by using your thumb as a pointer. With that method, you can count the number of indexes in SQL Server on one hand.

(Scott Mattie) With the latest releases of Intel processors and especially starting with the 4th generation (“Haswell” processors) to the latest 6th generation (“Skylake” processors) that are shipping with graphic cards that allow for 4k resolution.

(Sergey Gigoyan) Have you ever faced a situation when executing a large script file in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) that raises this error – “Cannot execute script. Insufficient memory to continue the execution of the program. (mscorlib)” ?

(Melissa Coates) Virtual machines (VMs) in Azure are fantastic. They are considered “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS) and can implement production workloads, dev/test environments, and as learning/sandbox areas.

(SHEHAP EL-NAGAR) In this installament of the TSQL Performance Tuning series we turn our attention to Views

(Pinal Dave) One of my clients asked me more about these messages logged in the SQL Server ERRORLOG. If you are new to SQL Server and don’t know how to reach to ERRORLOG, read below Where is ERRORLOG? Various Ways to Find ERRORLOG Location.