(Daniel Mellor) The other day I encountered a login error when connecting to a SQL Server. The circumstance seemed strange compared to similar errors described online with many of those seeming rather complicated to find the real solution.

(Kenneth Fisher) Many years ago Jeff Moden (of SQL Server Central fame) came up with the concept of RBAR. Row-By-Agonizing-Row. At it’s most basic it means you are inserting one row at a time. A more broad interpretation says it’s any type of loop even the type caused by a recursive CTE.

(Joe Celko) The ALL, SOME and ANY predicates aren’t much used in SQL Server, but they are there. You can use the Exists() predicate instead but the logic is more contorted and difficult to read at a glance. Set-oriented predicates can greatly simplify the answering of many real-life business questio

(Jeremy Kadlec) My team needs to manage hundreds, if not thousands of scheduled processes that run against my environment with numerous versions and editions of SQL Server including Express. Many processes we support have been developed internally, others are from third parties and a final set are a

(Pinal Dave) Recently I was contacted by a client who reported very strange error in the SQL Server machine. These consulting engagements sometimes get the best out of you when it comes to troubleshooting.

(Jeffrey Yao) There are multiple ways via SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) or dynamic SQL that we can generate a SELECT script that includes both the column name and the column value. This is useful to port data to other databases or to just have the data in a script that can be used to repopula

(Denny Cherry) Runbooks are very powerful tools which allow you to automate PowerShell commands which need to be run at different times. One of the problems that I’ve run across when dealing with Azure Runbooks is that there is no way to use the same script on prem during testing and the same scrip

(Kun Cheng) In the old days of Azure SQL Database (prior to V12), SQL Database used what is called a gateway to proxy all connections and communications between clients and user databases.

(Pinal Dave) In my recent past, I have helped around 10 customers who have had similar problems while installing SQL Server Cluster on windows. So I thought it would be a nice idea to pen it down as a blog post so that it can help others in future.

(Marcin Policht) One of the challenges when considering migrating your on-premises SQL Server databases to Azure SQL Database is its lack of support for Active Directory-integrated authentication.