(Pinal Dave) I just formatted my computer and installed fresh SQL Server 2014. The very first thing which I did was to open SQL Server Management Studio and execute a sample query.

(Vishwanath Dalvi) We cannot predict values for most future data points while working with database systems. For example, tables used for customer information often have a mobile number column. It is possible that a customer does not hold a mobile number, or for reasons of privacy, he does not want

(Jody Roberts) The Microsoft SQL Server Distributed Replay feature helps you assess the impact of future SQL Server upgrades. You can also use it to help assess the impact of hardware and operating system upgrades, and SQL Server tuning. Similar to SQL Server Profiler, you can use Distributed Replay

(David Bermingham) When deploying SQL Server in Windows Azure you must consider how to minimize both planned and unplanned downtime. Because you have given up control of the physical infrastructure, you cannot always determine when maintenance periods will occur.

(Tibor Nagy) I read in a PCI security tip that I should configure Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption on our SQL Servers, but this requires a trusted certificate. Could you please help me on how to complete this task?

(Pinal Dave) Seven years ago, I wrote a blog post about – Query to Find Seed Values, Increment Values and Current Identity Column value of the table. It is quite a popular blog post and lots of people like it as it gives immediate details about Identity Values.

(Dallas Snider) In this tip we walk through how to setup and view data using SQL Server Analysis Services Linear Regression Data Mining Algorithm.

(Vishwanath Dalvi) There are various times when we need to find duplicate records in SQL Server. It is possible to find duplicates using DISTINCT, ROW NUMBER as well as the GROUP BY approach.

(Michelle A. Poolet) Here’s a story that I’d like to share, about the infamous SQL Server 833. A while ago I was on a performance-tuning call at a client site; they’d been experiencing event 833 from some of their production SQL Servers, and they wanted to know if this was a SQL Server problem or a

(Tony Davis) It is useful to know that a SQL Query is slow, but it is even better to know why. To do this, we need to see how SQL Server’s Query Optimizer has translated the query into something that it can execute, and what happened at each stage of execution, and for this we need to see the execut