(Andrew J. Kelly) I was asked to participate in this new concept here at SQL Server Pro called IdeaXchange, and since it is new, I wasn’t sure which direction to go with this. Then, it hit me—in a way things have come full circle for me.

(Jeffery Yao) We have a customized database index maintenance job that runs every night, however from time to time the index maintenance job will block other business jobs or sessions and can cause business problems. So what should I do?

(Vikas Rana) Many customer asked me if there is any easy way to find the list of logins which are inactive and can be deleted hence thought of documenting this method using blog.

(Michael Corey, Jeff Szastak and Michael Webster) This chapter from Virtualizing SQL Server with VMware: Doing IT Right first covers the key aspects of storage architecture relevant to both physical and virtual environments as well as the differences you need to understand when architecting storage

(Richard_RP) Another pithily titled blog post, but this one revisits the feature of SQL Server 2014 that piqued my interest the most: Clustered Columnstore Indexes. I’ve been working with Clustered Columnstore Indexes for the past few months and recently a colleague had to split a non empty partitio

(blakhani) Recently someone ask this question to me – How would you move database files to new location with no downtime. Based on my knowledge, the downtime is needed as we need physical movement of the database files and they can’t be moved unless the handle is released by a process, which is sqls

(Pinal Dave) Earlier I wrote a blog post about SQL SERVER – Query to Find First and Last Day of Current Month and it is a very popular post. In this post, I convert the datetime to Varchar and later on use it.

(Don Boxley) Welcome to DH2i’s weekly contribution to the SQL Server Pro IdeaXchange. I’ll be sharing this responsibility with my co-founder and CTO, Thanh Ngo. Together we have over 20 years of experience with Microsoft SQL Server, ranging from software development and system migrations, to licensi

(Rick Dobson) My company receives sets of names in a variety of different formats from business partners. Are there any special tips for processing a whole set of name source strings instead of parsing them individually? Furthermore, what are some tips for parsing name source strings into one consis

(Keith Mayer) In a prior article, we walked through the process of auto-provisioning a new Windows Server Active Directory domain in the Cloud using a custom script that was processed via the Microsoft Azure VM Agent Custom Script Extension.