(John Sterrett) If I had a nickel for every time someone gave me a list of identifiers and asked me to pull a result set for them I would be a very wealthy man. Over the years this is an endless request. I used to use several different tools like excel for example to convert the list of identifiers

(Ahmad Yaseen) When security and auditing are crucial for your business, the IT security team would be very optimistic that you have configured the SQL Server Auditing option to monitor users actions on the production databases.

(James Serra) A “data lake” is a storage repository, usually in Hadoop, that holds a vast amount of raw data in its native format until it is needed. It’s a great place for investigating, exploring, experimenting, and refining data, in addition to archiving data. Some characteristics of a data lak

(Derik Hammer) Years ago I found myself frustrated with the SQL Server installation wizard. I was working for an organization where SQL Server installs were needed regularly during points in their operational cycle and often they were not cookie cutter. Tweaks were necessary to many of their configu

(Pinal Dave) In SQL Server both SET and SELECT can be used to assign a value to a variable as shown in the following example

(Kris Wenzel) This is the introductory article in a series explaining the three simple steps I take to writing complex SQL statements.

(Kenneth Fisher) I’m by no means an expert in SQL Server encryption. What I do know however, is that the Service Master Key is the top of the encryption chain on an instance. This means that any certificate or key will be encrypted using, in part, the Service Master Key. So if you are using encrypti

(Scott Murray) As report designers working with SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) charts, what are some tidbits that will help solve common charting situations with pie charts, working with data outliers and rendering reports on my mobile phone?

(Rohit Garg) The Resource database is a read-only database that contains all the system objects. This DB included with SQL Server 2005 to increase security of system metadata. SQL Server system objects, such as sys.objects, are physically persisted in the Resource database, but they logically appear

(Jen McCown) Sean’s RegEx for DBAs class must be finally sinking in for me. Today I was able to figure out a RegEx thing in SQL Server Management Studio.