This is going to be a bit of a brain storming post that comes from an interesting question that I was asked today…

“I’ve got a table with a ID code field, now some of the rows have a value in that field and some are NULL. How can I…

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With all things containers I refer to my good friend Andrew Pruski. Known as dbafromthecold on twitter he blogs at https://dbafromthecold.com

I was reading his latest blog post Using docker named volumes to persist databases in SQL Server and decided to give it a try.

His instructions worked perfectly and… Read more

Watch this week’s episode on YouTube

It’s important to be aware of columns that allow NULL values since SQL Server may handle NULLs differently than you might expect.

Today I want to look at what things to consider when joining on columns containing NULL values.

Natural, Composite, NULLable keys

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OMG! My brain almost blew up. All because of MVP Summit I’ve just returned from. Obviously (due to NDA), I can’t tell you what I’ve seen and found out, tons of very interesting sessions, not only including those about Big Data Cluster. Believe me or not – the universe is… Read more

(last updated: 2019-03-26 @ 11:00 EST / 2019-03-26 @ 15:00 UTC )

The Problem

I do a fair bit of research and writing about collations, encodings, Unicode, etc and have found that in order to do thorough research, I often need to make use of non-standard-ASCII characters. Sometimes this is… Read more

(Be sure to checkout the FREE SQLpassion Performance Tuning Training Plan - you get a weekly email packed with all the essential knowledge you need to know about performance tuning on SQL Server.)

I have already shown you in the past how to install and run SQL Server in Docker… Read more

This is in response to someone asking about getting started with their database in SQL  Source Control and then hosting at BitBucket. I’m going to assume people can set up an account at Bitbucket and won’t cover that. Instead, this is part of a series that looks at getting a… Read more

I love the questions I get when presenting: Can You Force a Parallel Plan in Query Store. I haven’t a clue. The trick I think is going to be in setting up the test. Let’s try it out. Reliably Getting a Parallel Plan Because this is for testing, rather than… Read more

Recently (honestly it’s been a few years now) Microsoft split the lifecycle for SSMS out from the general SQL Server lifecycle. That has the huge benefit of not having to wait on a new version of SQL to get new features in SSMS. They come out so often, in fact,… Read more

Everything can be fixed with a query hint (*cough* directive), right? If a certain process is consistently causing deadlocks, a simple ROWLOCK hint can be added to prevent it, right?

Well, for whatever reason, there seems to be a myth out there that when deadlocks come a-knocking, then just throw… Read more

Good day! Good week! Let’s start it with some news form the Data Platform world!

SQL Internals – Physical Table Structure under the hood, and implementation on real case scenarios

An article by Ron Ariely where he has summarized a meeting with PASS DBA Virtual Group. A lot of details… Read more

New podcast’s episode is coming (next Friday) and in the meantime, take a look you can watch that episode’s trailer. Do you know which conference was inspired by the SQLBits conference? How to make a success as a team at work? What’s important in your public speaking? Simply click the… Read more

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!

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I’m working the first section of a basic administration course, and the first part of this is installing SQL Server 2019. I built a similar course a few years back for SQL Server 2016, but the world has changed. As I review the requirements for installation, it’s interesting to note… Read more

I was working on another post when I found myself needing to dump out query results to a grid format to include in the post.  This is a very normal situation - even in my day-to-day job I send emails with grids of results (we all do right?)

The easiest…

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One of the new phrases coming out of Microsoft is that “SQL is just SQL” regardless of what operating system it resides on.   This was echoed during the keynote at SQL Bits 2019 by the Microsoft team, which you can watch here.   Later that weekend, I gave a session… Read more

Change detection is a critical component of any system that moves data from one structure to another. Most data movement mechanisms are designed to move a subset of the data – only that which is new or changed since the last load. For that to work properly, there must be… Read more

I’ve previously talked about using named volumes to persist SQL Server databases but in that post I only used one named volume and I had to manually reattach the databases after the container spun up.

This isn’t really ideal, what we’d want is for the databases to automatically be attached… Read more

The March 2019 release of Power BI Desktop has brought us keyboard accessible visual interactions. One of Power BI’s natural strengths is that you can click on a data point within a visual and have it cross-highlight or cross-filter the other visuals on a page. But keyboard-only users weren’t able… Read more

Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD) is a cloud based service to handle the identity and access management. It has the capabilities like multi factor authentication, self-service password reset, role based access control, security monitoring, managing alerts etc. When user create an Azure AD directory it automatically links with Azure subscription.…

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