Working with Indexes on SSMS
Overview: In SQL Server, indexing is a technique used to improve the performance of queries by reducing the amount of data that SQL Server needs to scan. You can think of it like a table of contents in a book—it helps SQL Server find data more quickly. …
SQL Server Threats
Microsoft SQL Server is a robust relational database management system. It stores and processes sensitive data for countless applications, which also makes it a high-value target for cybercriminals. Below are some security threats that SQL Server envir …
Deprecated but Forgotten: Why SQL Server’s Text, NText, and Image Data Types Still Haunt Your Systems
Introduction These data types – TEXT, NTEXT, and IMAGE – have been part of SQL Server since its earliest versions, designed to store large objects like documents, HTML, and binary data when there was no better alternative. However, starting from SQL Se …
Why CQRS and Event Sourcing Are Gaining Ground in High-Concurrency Web Systems
In web app development company boardrooms, architects and engineers are debating old assumptions. Scaling up isn’t just about faster servers or better caching anymore. It’s about reshaping how systems think. CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregati …
How to Make Leading Wildcard Searches Fast
99.9% of you are never gonna need this. But let’s say you need to run queries with leading (not trailing) wildcards, like this search for all the different national versions of the Encabulator, each of which has different prefixes depending on which go …
Who’s Hiring in the Microsoft Database Community? August 2025 Edition
Is your company hiring for a database position as of August 2025? Do you wanna work with the kinds of people who read this blog? Let’s make a love connection. If your company is hiring, leave a comment. The rules: Your comment must include the job titl …
Mastering SQL VIEWs: Syntax, Use Cases, and Best Practices
VIEWs are an undervalued and underused feature in SQL. They basically consist of a query that has been given a name, and a parameter list, so can be used like an inline macro. Technically, you’re supposed to think of it as a virtual table. The idea of …
Yet another Date Dimension
Evolution of code The thing with any bit of code that has been around for a while, is that when change comes along, the tendency is to cater for the change by adding new stuff, while nothing gets taken away. Some stuff has definitely been taken away …
Advanced SQL Server Page Forensics: Detecting Page Splits and Allocations with DBCC PAGE
Introduction Page splits are one of those silent performance killers in SQL Server that many DBAs have heard about but rarely analyze in depth. On the surface, inserts might look harmless – rows keep getting added, queries return results, and no errors …
How to Access and Use Azure Key Vault Secrets in an Azure Devops Pipeline
When you run a CI/CD pipeline, you often need confidential values like passwords, authentication tokens, service principal secrets etc. when you want to deploy a certain artefact. You don’t want to store those secrets directly in your pipelines as this …
How to Use the psql Command-Line Tool with Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server
A number of client tools are available for working with Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server. With these tools, you can connect to your ADP instance, manage the environment, and define your database structures. You can also query, update and d …
Connect Cloud Power BI to on prem SQL Server
Power BI has the versatility that you can publish your reports to the cloud (Power BI Service) and grant your organization’s individuals with access to view them anywhere and from any device. If there’s changing data then you need a way to refresh it a …
Model Context Protocol (MCP): A Developer’s Guide to Long-Context LLM Integration
Large Language Models (LLMs) like Anthropic’s Claude have unlocked massive context windows (up to 100k tokens in Claude 2) that let them consider entire documents or codebases in a single go. However, effectively providing relevant context to these mod …
How to safely and surgically restore filegroups
In all my years working with SQL Server and navigating disaster recovery scenarios, I’ve come across surprisingly few practical and comprehensive guides on filegroup-level restoration. While many resources cover full and differential backups well enoug …
[Video] Office Hours: Interview Horror Stories Edition
Wanna hear about my worst job interviews? I drove up to 8,000 feet where it’s 30 degrees colder than Las Vegas to bring you these answers to your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento. The audio’s a little odd on here because it was …