(Andreas Wolter) This article picks up a topic I have been teaching time and again in seminars, at conferences and in forums for many years: Schema-Design.

(Sander Stad) SQL Server instances are generally poorly-documented. How easily can you tell if something has changed? How easily can you check that there is adequate space for growth? Are you up-to-date with licenses? What errors are happening? Who has accessing the system? Before PowerShell, it was

(Jessica Sirkin) SQL Server 2005 end of life is coming this month. Experts explain which version of SQL Server to upgrade to, and where in the migration process organizations need to be.

(James Serra) One of the advantages Azure SQL Database has over on-prem SQL Server is the ease in which it can scale. I’ll discuss the various options for horizontal scaling, vertical scaling, and other similar features.

(Michael J. Swart) As many people will point out, you can’t depend on the order of results without using the ORDER BY clause. So it’s easy to say “Simple! Don’t write code that expects unsorted data to be sorted”. But it’s very difficult to be careful everywhere all the time.

With the Always Encrypted feature enabled your SQL Server data will always be encrypted within SQL Server. Access to encrypted data will only be available to the applications calling SQL Server.

(Koen Verbeeck) SQL Server 2016 – which is currently still in preview at the time of writing – introduces several enhancements to the Transact-SQL language used by the database engine. This tip will guide you through the most notable changes and additions.

(Denny Cherry) Recently I was working on a clients file server cluster and while doing some troubleshooting with Microsoft Support one of the clustered disks wouldn’t respond correctly.

(Marlon Ribunal) Microsoft R Server, or Revolution R Enterprise (RRE) as it is formally known, for now, is basically a platform for advanced analytics designed to tackle big data statistics, predictive modeling, and machine-learning capabilities.

(Derik Hammer) Last time, I discussed the simplest Availability Group architecture, with only a single site. In this post I will expand upon the same architecture, adding in a second site to achieve more than just high-availability.