(Kenneth Fisher) Have you ever seen a constraint with a name like PK__TableNam__EA185FBF8FF1529D? It’s kind of funny looking right? I mean it makes no difference in terms of how things run but it does make it a bit of a pain when you need to code with it.

(Dwain Camps) What better way to learn how to construct complex CHECK CONSTRAINTs, use the SQL 2012 window frame capability of the OVER clause and LEAD analytic function, as well as how to pivot rows into columns using a crosstab query? Create the SQL code to score Ten-pin Bowling, of course.

(Scott Murray) What exactly are SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) Aggregations and how exactly can I review and use them?

(Chris Webb) It’s a general rule of the internet that, whenever you have a cool idea, a few minutes spent on your favourite search engine reveals that someone else has had the idea before you. In my case, when I first saw the functionality in Power Query for working with binary files I wondered whet

(Pinal Dave) This is one of the toughest topics to address, and I am always looking at new tools that can help me learn and understand SQL Server better. In many cases, I fall back to MSDN documentation and official statements from the Microsoft site because a lot of R&D generally has been done by t

(Troy Hunt) Here’s your situation: you’ve got a heap of websites on traditional hosting models. Shared tenancies on single logical machines, dedicated infrastructure or even worse, not really any idea because you just keep paying that $5 per month and stuff works. Most of the time.

(Kenneth Fisher) EXCEPT and INTERSECT are two uncommon commands. Not that they do anything odd but they aren’t exactly well known in any detail or used very often. I’ve been using them myself a bit recently and thought I would explore.

(Donabel Santos) I had a question from one of my students tonight about how to show the header for text table with a single measure. It’s not super straightforward to do this in Tableau. You can’t simply to go the measure pill and show the header (because it doesn’t have it).

(Rodney Landrum) I was a bit nervous this morning. I had been tasked with adding two SQL instances back into a master/target (MSX/TSX) relationship so that they would receive updated job code that had a new DFS share backup maintenance plans. Why was I nervous? Well, nervous might not be the right w

(dbafromthecold) I have recently seen some “bad plans” being generated by the optimiser and from investigation, the cause came down to the fact that the collation of the database where the queries were running was different to the tempdb collation.