(Grant Fritchey) Wait statistics are a vital part of understanding what is causing your system to run slowly. Capturing them can be done through a variety of mechanisms from sys.dm_os_wait_stats (use this query for that) to sys.dm_db_wait_stats in Azure SQL Database.

(Pinal Dave) On May 25, 2018, European privacy law is going to enforce new global standards for privacy rights, security, and compliance. This new regulation is known as GDPR – General Data Protection Regulations.

(Mike Ketchum) Last week we announced general availability for Virtual Network Service Endpoints and Firewalls for Azure Storage in all Azure public cloud and Azure Government regions.

(Pinal Dave) SQL Server 2017 has a wonderful feature which fixes a very old issue which DBA and developers have been struggling for a while. It would be impossible to find DBA or Developer who has not faced an issue when their identity column value has jumped or incremented by 1000.

(Steve Endow) I just discovered a fun mistake that I made in a SQL script. It’s a rookie mistake, but it’s one of those somewhat novel mistakes that I think is easily missed in many projects.

(James Serra) In this podcast I talk with Mike Rabinovici of Dimodelo Solutions about data being the new currency, the importance of showing customers the art of the possible, and last but not least my go to TV show.

(Kenneth Fisher) Last month I demonstrated creating an Azure VM with SQL installed using one of the default templates. While this is a very easy way to stand up a SQL Server very quickly there are some downsides.

(Paul White) The SQL Server product documentation is a bit light on the topic of row goals. The main official references are in:

(Pinal Dave) Recently during Comprehensive Database Performance Health Check, to test our unique fix, we had to run a stress test on my customer’s development environment. Once we were done testing our script, we did not need our stress test queries to run on our server.

(Anuj Chaudhary) PIM for Azure Resources provides Just in Time (JIT) and Temporary access capabilities for Azure Resources.