(Pinal Dave) I do apply patches to my SQL instances as and when they are released by Microsoft. This is important because I always feel keeping the bits uptodate is essential because I don’t want to get infected as I travel quite a bit.

(Kenneth Fisher) Every now and again you need to run code when your instance starts up. For example you might want to check if the SQL Agent is running.

(Fikrat Azizov) While working on SQL Server performance optimization for one of my customers I came across a very long running stored procedure which was doing the following; a ‘SELECT’ query inserting its output into temporary table, followed by an ‘INSERT’ query reading from this temporary table,

(Steve Endow) I generally try and avoid using triggers, but they do play an important role, and occasionally I do have to develop them or interact with them.

(Steve Hood) I see TempDB using more memory than I feel it should and found a way to resolve it. Previously I dove into technical details and questioning what I saw in my post TempDB Memory Leak? which is great for proving and debugging an issue.

(Nakul Vachhrajani) We use SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) for all of our data movement and upgrades. Recently, when running a particular SSIS package, one of our new servers threw a strange error:

(Arshad Ali) SQL Server 2005 introduced native support for storing, managing and processing XML data when XML had become de-facto standard for data interchange.

(Pinal Dave) When I was writing the blog SQL SERVER 2016 – InMemory OLTP support for Foreign Key, it felt like a great addition to SQL Server. I felt there must be something that I might be missing as the obvious.

(Scott Mattie) One of the cool things that was added a few years back was the Central Management Servers feature. It was introduced in the Standard and Enterprise editions of SQL Server 2008.

(Sergey Gigoyan) Database backups and restores have many options in SQL Server. There are standard steps to implement backup and restore solutions, however in some situations additional knowledge is needed.