(Arun Sirpal) I could not read my error log on one of my local SQL Servers, when I executed the following code:

(Shreyas R Gowda) A couple of times now I have faced this issue with my clients where SQL Server session is blocked by another session that has a negative SPID value. When we ran sp_who2 the SPID value that was blocking was (-2). When we tried to KILL the session we got an error that this is not a v

(Jeffrey Yao) Copying data from an Oracle table to a SQL Server table is not as simple as you would expect especially when you need to consider performance and flexibility to handle multiple sources. Is there a convenient and quick way to accomplish moving data from Oracle to SQL Server?

(Pinal Dave) Yesterday I shared a blog post where I discussed how to list all the users with the System Admin (sysadmin) rights. I have received a quite a few emails and comments on this subject.

(Thomas LaRock) Your SQL Server database contains data that should be masked from end users, but you have no way of determining which columns are candidates for Dynamic Data Masking (DDM). How can we identify the columns and implement SQL Server DDM to protect this data?

(Grant Fritchey) Have you ever looked at the properties inside an execution plan and wondered what the units of measure were? I know I have. I also get the question pretty frequently about all sorts of properties. What does EstimatedAvailableMemoryGrant display it’s units in anyway? For that matter,

(Thomas LaRock) You may have heard about the latest security issues with CPUs that affect Intel, AMD, and ARM processors. The attacks, named Meltdown and Spectre, were prompting DBAs around the globe to ask “how will this patch affect SQL Server performance”. The answer is simple: We don’t know for

(Pinal Dave) I always try to share my knowledge and learning from a client engagement. This helps me in remembering the steps I took to reach to the solution. It also helps my blog readers to follow the same steps and fix their problem rather than waiting for some expert to fix it.

(Jason Brimhall) I have been working on this article for far longer than one might think is necessary for something of this nature. Truth be told, I was reluctant because there are so many people that quickly jumped on the wagon to write about this feature as soon as it was released. With some coerc

(Michael J. Swart) There’s increasing pressure to keep software services available all the time. But there’s also pressure to deploy improvements frequently. How many of us would love to reduce the duration of migration windows or better yet eliminate them entirely.