(Steve Stedman) Many times I have worked on a database that has evolved over 10 or more years of changes from different developers and DBAs. One of the signs I see in databases like this is the waste associated with obsolete columns.

(Michael Otey) Probably the most anticipated new feature in the SQL Server 2012 (formerly code-named Denali) release is the new AlwaysOn Availability Groups high-availability feature. Earlier versions of SQL Server provided Windows Failover Clustering (WSFC), designed for server-level protection, an

(Sadequl Hussain) New to MAP 5.0 is another feature called the Software Usage Tracker. This is an audit mechanism that allows you to track the number of users or devices accessing your servers. The information from these audits can help people responsible for managing software licensing to get a bet

(Pinal Dave) Azure SQL database backup used to be a difficult task. Not any more. With SQLBackupAndFTP with Azure it became trivial. Here’s what you basically need to do:

(Feodor Georgiev) One way of getting the advantages of the Cloud without having to migrate the entire database is to just maintain a copy of the data that needs to be accessible to internet-based users in Windows Azure SQL Database.

(Kenneth Fisher) Did you know that the GO command isn’t really part of T-SQL? It’s what’s called a batch separator. And in case you were wondering that’s why you can’t put GO inside of stored procedures, functions etc.

(Edwin Sarmiento) In a previous tip on Configure SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Group Read-Only Routing using T-SQL, we have seen how we can configure read-only routing and to automatically redirect the read-only workloads to a secondary replica after a failover.

(Pinal Dave) Sometime I feel I know a lot about SQL Server and very next moment, I realize that honestly I do not know much about this product. Earlier today, I had similar moments. I was playing with few DMVs and suddenly I ended up on the DMV sys.dm_xe_map_values. There are only four columns and o

(Scott Murray) Often when working with OLAP cubes, the main “access” point will be an Excel pivot table. While utilizing OLAP cubes, end users will frequently want to compare two values from different periods in order to quantify some variance analysis processes; however the creation of calculations

Microsoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson, is here. Today’s blog is a bit unique. I was throwing around ideas with Chad Miller, and somehow we came up with the idea that he would share some tips for the SQL Server Windows PowerShell scripter.