(Erin Stellato) Service Pack 2 for SQL Server 2014 was released last month (read the release notes here) and includes a new DBCC statement: DBCC CLONEDATABASE.

(Joe Celko) When you’re formatting SQL Code, your objective is to make the code as easy to read with understanding as is possible, in a way that errors stand out. The extra time it takes to write code in an accessible way is far less than the time saved by the poor soul in the future, possibly yours

(Pinal Dave) One of my clients asked assistance in fixing an interesting issue. They informed me that they are not able to run any job in SQL Agent. When they try to run the job manually, they are seeing below message related to SQLServerAgent .

(Greg Larsen) There are times when you want some users to see part of a column value but not the whole thing, but you want other users to see the complete column value without any masking. For example you may want to only allow your call center staff to only see the last 4 digits for a credit card

(Michael Otey) With the recent release of SQL Server 2016, current SQL Server users can start looking at possible upgrades. You can perform an in-place upgrade from any of the supported versions of the database to the new one using the SQL Server Installation Center.

(Jeremy Kadlec) Our job scheduling is so complex, from a business perspective. We have a number of related processes that we need to call over the course of the day. We have setup many of these processes in SQL Server as jobs across numerous SQL Server instances that call stored procedures and SSIS

(Hari Yadav) So many of the problems that organisations have with their IT applications are due to the struggle with data, in the absence of overall organization-wide control and supervision of data and its progress through the various parts of the organization.

(Steve Endow) I recently delivered a new version of a GP customization. The new version was deployed to a test environment, and right away, the user encountered an odd error.

(Pinal Dave) If you have ever interacted with me or taken my services, you would notice that I always ask for ERRORLOG in almost all of my contact with my client. Once of my friend contacted me and when I asked for ERRORLOG, he informed that there is no ERRORLOG file and SQL is not getting started.

(Ranga Babu) We had a requirement to move the Subscriber for a Merge publication to a new SQL Server. We could have dropped the old subscriber and created a new subscriber, but in this tip we look at another option.