(Nakul Vachhrajani) Helping the community via forums often leads to some very interesting moments. Recently, I came across quite a common question – as part of a data migration, someone wanted to pad integers with zeroes. There are various variations to this question, namely:

(Grant Fritchey) In a previous post, I showed how to set up statistics maintenance for your Azure databases using Azure Automation. However, what I didn’t show was how to generate an alert when things go south. Let’s do that now.

(Steve Endow) I think I’ve been writing SQL statements since 1996. Maybe I encountered this scenario many years ago, but completely forgot about it. But I am pretty sure that since I have been working with GP over the last 13 years, I can’t remember ever encountering it.

(Pinal Dave) As a part of my passion, I try to help people in fixing simple issues and explain the behavior by looking at logs. Here is an email from my friend about Availability Group Missing or Deleted Automatically.

(Chris Webb) I first became aware of the server-wide lock taken out by SSAS when processing finishes – and the issues that this can cause – from this blog post by Andrew Calvett back in 2009.

(Melissa Coates) Just a quick tip about why you might notice some sizes are not available when you are attempting to change the size/scale level of an Azure virtual machine in the portal.

(Tim Smith) We’ve noticed that holidays and weekends impact our collection of metrics across our systems. Should we track these, or are there easy ways we filter these out?

(Nakul Vachhrajani) I recently updated my personal sandbox to use SQL Server 2016. While the installation succeeded, one of the first few problems that I ran into were:

(Pinal Dave) While I have been blogging about SQL Server for a long time, I still believe that there is still a lot of error which are not discovered by me. It is always fun to see new error and find a fix for the issue. Let us see how to fix error related to MERGE statement.

(Joshua Feierman) The network is important to any DBA because so much performance is dependent on I/O, because of the importance of security, and ensuring that everyone get the right access. DBAs generally need not become experts in Azure networks, but it helps to understand the concepts and languag