(Dennes Torres) SQL Server batch processes are usually run from SQL Agent in background. They can take significant time and resources, especially if they are ETL tasks. Quite often, the responsibility for creating these tasks belongs entirely to the developer.

(Jeffrey Yao) In my daily work as a SQL Server DBA, there are many times I want to do things in parallel, for example:

(Kenneth Fisher) When SSIS first came out there were huge numbers of jokes and posts about all of the problems and how everyone thought DTS was much better and did they really have to switch?

(Pinal Dave) You know that RAND() function in SQL Server generates a random float value 0 through 1 (excluding 0 and 1).

(Arshad Ali) Often while reporting you will encounter a situation where you will have comma separated (or separated with some other character) values in a single column but you want to report them in rows whereas in some other cases you might have values in multiple rows and want them to be a single

(Erin Stellato) In my previous post on incremental statistics, a new feature in SQL Server 2014, I demonstrated how they can help decrease maintenance task duration. This is because statistics can be updated at the partition level, and the changes merged into the main histogram for the table.

(Kalen Delaney) So here it is, the bits and bytes post I’ve been promising….

(Robert Sheldon) It is no good doing some or most of the aspects of SQL Server security right. You have to get them all right, because any effective penetration of your security is likely to spell disaster.

(Simon Sabin) I love PowerBI, actually I love PowerQuery. It’s a great way to combine data from around your business, across the web from anywhere. What I really like is very little is done automatically, i.e. it doesn’t do the nice data type detection you get with Excel that screws your imports if

(Rick Heiges) Microsoft has introduced, as a preview feature, row-level security (RLS) in Azure SQL databases. Row-level security enables customers to control access to rows in a database table based on the characteristics of the user executing a query (e.g., group membership or execution context).