(Tim Ford) Microsoft’s SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) does suffer from a lack of dedicated developer talent assigned to update it, but it’s the best tool we currently have for the full range of administrative duties database administrators face.

(Chris Webb) One of the more recent additions to Power Query is the ability to access data from named ranges in the Excel worksheet rather than an Excel table. I’ve got used to formatting data as tables in Excel because that’s what Power Pivot needs to import data directly from the worksheet, but if

(Mike Davis) Packages can be scheduled to run at a time when you expect data to be in a database. Instead of guessing the time when the data will be in the database we can have the package look for data in a SQL table. When the table has data then the package will begin.

(Pinal Dave) With schools starting for my daughter, I rarely get involved in her daily routine activity. But there is one thing that I don’t try to miss – the parents-teachers meet. Sometimes it is not about the report card on how my daughter faired against the rest in the class but it is more than

(Tim Ford) OK, a show of hands everyone. . . tell me how many of you have run a query against the wrong instance. . . oh, and when I say wrong I mean W-R-O-N-G. We’re talking take-down-production-and lose-data-wrong. Come on, don’t be shy. Don’t lie to me. I can tell when you’re lying. You’re about

(Jeff Sanders) I needed to attach an existing Azure SQL database to my .NET Backend. This will allow me to expose existing data using the Azure Mobile Service I have defined. This will walk you through the steps I took and get you on your way!

(Kenneth Fisher) I seem to get a lot of permissions questions these days and one of the more frequent ones goes along these lines “I still don’t have the right permissions on database xyq.”

(Michelle Taylor) If you’ve got an environment which is at the end of an unreliable or slow network connection, or isn’t connected to your network at all, and you want to do a deployment to that environment – then pointing SQL Compare at it directly is difficult or impossible.

(Pinal Dave) This article shows how to use ApexSQL Complete, a free SQL Server intellisense add-in. You can download ApexSQL Complete, and play along through the article.

(Robert Sheldon) Although SQL Data Types seem to cause a lot of grief for database developers and can be tricky in their use, we seem to be expected to know all about them, and so it is embarrassing to ask questions about them in forums.