(Steve Hood) Reading the SQL Server Error Log is miserable. It contains very useful information you should address as soon as possible, or at least know that it’s happening. However, it’s hidden between so many informational messages that it’s hard to find, then it’s spread out between multiple fi

(Nakul Vachhrajani) Identification of changes made to the data in a system is an important aspect of data storage design and data cleanup/quality improvement activities. For most enterprise systems, the need to implement change detection is driven by some sort of auditing requirements.

(Tim Wiseman) I need to merge two similar tables from different SQL Server databases and also merge the child tables that are connected by foreign key relationships. The parent tables use an identity for their primary key, so I need to track and maintain the relationships when I copy the data over.

(Pinal Dave) InMemory topics are always interesting and a great learning experience. When I wrote the other post, it was more about how InMemory tables are loaded into memory even if they are not queried.

(Koen Verbeeck) SQL Server 2016, which is at the time of writing is in preview release CTP 2.1, has a great new feature called Live Query Statistics. It allows you to view a live execution plan of an active query, which gives us a fantastic opportunity for troubleshooting and debugging. This tip wil

(Kenneth Fisher) This isn’t something you have to do frequently, but sometimes you don’t want the users to have access to certain columns in a table. For example let’s say you have a salary column in your employee table that you don’t want everyone seeing.

(Denny Cherry) Indexes are good, except when they aren’t. Everything that you do in SQL Server has trade offs. Usually those tradeoffs are easy to see, unless they aren’t.

(Chris Yates) T-SQL Tuesday is here again. I’ve had good intentions the past few times this event has come around and even have drafts still waiting to be queued up which I will eventually turn into regular blog posts, but I decided to just make time this month and jump back into the monthly party.

(Pinal Dave) I wrote the first part of FAQ in here. This is not a typical blog post but more of a process oriented topic when working with ColumnStore Indexes.

(Derik Hammer) After you provision a Microsoft Azure VM with SQL Server there are a few more steps that you need to take to make remote connections. The procedure below starts with a fresh Azure VM provisioned and walks through the process of establishing a connection via SQL Server Management Studi