(Kris Wenzel) Both TOP and OFFSET & FETCH can be used to limit the number of rows returned. OFFSET and FETCH can return similar results to top, but there are differences which may influence which method is best for you to use in your given situation.

(Robert Sheldon) NULLs in SQL are a mixed blessing. The Three-Valued Logic of SQL has its uses but can cause difficulties to anyone who assumes that NULL has a ‘value’.

(Pinal Dave) Some of the simple learnings can come from unexpected places and this blog post is a classic example to that statement. Recently I got an email from one of my readers about the below error message:

(Daniel Farina) I have a large table with millions of historical records. I was asked to remove millions of old records from this table, but this table is accessed by our system 24×7, so there isn’t a good time to do massive deletes without impacting the system. In this tip I will show you an unconv

(Pinal Dave) We learn from mistakes and we improvise with experience. I couldn’t think of a better example than the one below for this. I have been watching many sessions by various speakers and found that many times they have struggled to get rid of below error message.

(Tyler Chessman) Recently, I needed to optimize a nightly batch process for a SQL Server data warehouse that involved loading over 250,000 flat files.

(Derik Hammer) Earlier this year Microsoft Azure implemented Row-Level Security (Brent’s announcement). In following Microsoft’s cloud-first release concept, this great feature is now part of SQL Server 2016 CTP2, and expected to be included in the RTM version.

(Melissa Coates) In looking at Datazen recently, there is one feature that jumped out at me as being very useful for prototyping. Datazen calls it the ‘Design-First’ methodology.

(Scott Murray) Does SQL Server Analysis Services SSAS MDX have Row Number, Rank and Dense Rank functions like the SQL Server database engine?

(James Serra) Microsoft Azure Stream Analytics (ASA) is a fully managed cloud service for real-time processing of streaming data. ASA makes it easy to set up real-time analytic computations on data flowing in from devices, sensors, web sites, applications and infrastructure systems.