(Jovan Popovic) One of the features that are coming in SQL Server 2016 CTP2 is JSON support. In this post I will explain what JSON functionalities will be available in CTP2 release. Note that this is just a first set of functions, others will come in CTP3.

(Arshad Ali) Microsoft Power BI is a cloud based self-service BI solution for the enterprise. Power BI provides capabilities that can be leveraged by people with all level of skills including data analysts, power users, business users, data stewards and folks from the IT department.

(Pinal Dave) Getting little help and learning from each other always helps. When I don’t get to know of something and I need to explore something, I try to check with my SQL friends who can guide me in the right direction.

(Chris Webb) One problem that can really drive you crazy when working with data from text files is the many different formats that dates and numbers can be stored in around the world. For example, take a look at the contents of a tab-delimited file shown in the following screenshot:

(Kris Wenzel) In this article we learn the difference between primary and foreign keys, and why both are important to maintaining a relational database structure.

(K. Brian Kelley) I have a job that runs at a particular time during the week. However, this week it didn’t run when I expected. I haven’t modified that job in any way. I did modify another job’s schedule, and the job in question ran at the exact time I set the second job to run.

(Robert Sheldon) One of the times that you need things to go right is when you are doing analysis and reporting. This is generally based on time and date. A sure-fire way of getting managers upset is to get the figures horribly wrong by messing up the way that you handle datetime values in SQL Serve

(Pinal Dave) One of the classics as far as best practices is concerned is to exclude SQL Server files and folders on your antivirus programs running on the server. We all know this statements and often I see DBAs not adding any extra care to this recommendation. There are not many blogs that call th

(Tim Smith) We recently discovered that on some days, we don’t have the full database backups that we should for each SQL Server instance. Apparently, the application terminates, but never notifies us that it failed. We verify backups as often as we can in our restricted environment, but wondered if

(Matt Bowler) A colleague of mine discovered an interesting behaviour change from SQL Server 2012 to SQL Server 2014. We recently upgraded one of our servers from SQL 2012 to SQL 2014 and a job started failing.