(Jason Brimhall) Extended Events is a wonderful tool. Execution Plans are also some wonderful things – or are a wonderful tool as well. Both of these tools are fantastic for troubleshooting. Combined, they can potentially be even better.

(Ed Elliott) Creating a publically available version of the adventureworks 2012 oltp database but by putting it under source control, implementing unit tests and improving the design and code to fit modern development guidelines.

(Ghanesh Prasad) SQL Server Reporting Services provides many different rendering extensions. Our users don’t want to see the list of all rendering extensions, they only want to see Excel and PDF rendering extensions. How can you enable or disable Rendering Extensions in SQL Server Reporting Services

(Pinal Dave) Errors related to logins are one of the most searched in this blog. Many of the blogs that talk about these errors are the ones that get viewed often too.

(Tim Smith) One of the most popular questions I’ve been asked relates to how we look at data. Most are derivatives of the question, “What are some other ways I can look at these data,” whether that’s in the form of other dimensions, correlations, comparable data sets, etc.

(Jonathan Allen) Database security, and the lack thereof, has been constantly in the news. It seems like at least once a month we hear about a major breach in a large corporation or government agency. Some of this can be mitigated by applying encryption and hashing techniques, but doing so is tediou

(Chris Webb) The other day, while helping a customer with some particularly nasty MDX scoped assignments, I realised that there weren’t many good resources on the internet that explained how to use the MDX Freeze statement.

(Pinal Dave) Last weekend I happened to be in one of the beautiful cities in Sri Lanka for some fun time with SQL Enthusiasts. We had our first ever SQLSaturday Event in Sri Lanka and it was just too much fun to be amongst the amazing audiences.

(Dennes Torres) Sometimes, while searching the root cause of database problems, we face page IDs and need to find to which object that page belongs.

(dbafromthecold) One of the feature I’ve been interested in that’s coming with SQL Server 2016 is the stretched database. The ability to “stretch” individual tables in a database into the cloud seems really cool and could help organisations easily archive their data.