DISTINCT and UNION: What happens when you use them together?
When I was perusing my LinkedIn feed the other day, I came across this thread about using SELECT *. In one of the replies, Aaron Cutshall noted that: “Another real performance killer is SELECT DISTINCT especially when combined with UNION. I have a whol …
Free Webcast Tomorrow: Mastering Server Tuning
This is it: the very peak of my free SQL Server Spring Training webcast series. I’ve been teaching 60-90 minutes of my most popular classes for free this spring, and now it’s time for the Mastering classes. Tomorrow I’m covering Mastering Server Tuning …
Top 5 Power BI Common Pitfalls
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Introduction to GitHub Actions Part 2: GitHub-hosted runners
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Data Encoding Schemes
You probably noticed that when you get a bill or bank statement, it uses the current modern Western version of Hindu-Arabic numerals. Yet during the early days of the Renaissance, the accounting firms in Italy often boasted that they kept their records …
How SQL Server 2025’s Optional Parameter Plan Optimization Works
About three years ago, SQL Server 2022 introduced Parameter-Sensitive Plan Optimization (PSPO). At the time, I explained that it didn’t work particularly well, and went so far as to pronounce PSPO in a rather unflattering way. I wouldn’t suggest that a …
SQL Server Developer Standard Edition: A Gift to Developers!
This article is part of a series of posts on the forthcoming SQL Server 2025 release. Once 2025 has been released, posts will be kept if the feature hasn’t changed for the final release. For other posts in this series, you can find them in this collect …
How I Configure SQL Server Management Studio v21
Several years ago, I wrote a post about how I configure older versions of SQL Server Management Studio, but now that SSMS v21 is out, it’s time to revisit that post. SSMS v21 is built on the Visual Studio shell, so it’s got a lot of cool new tricks. Le …
SQL Server 2025 is in Public Preview!
On Monday, May 19, 2025, SQL Server 2025 was announced as finally going to be in public preview. Instead of rumors or going to a Bob Ward session at a conference, you can now experience it for yourself. In this blog, I want to give you a few links I ha …
SQL STRING_AGG Function Use and Examples
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New Objects in SQL Server 2025 – And Thousands of New Undocumented Feature Flags!
The first public preview of SQL Server 2025 dropped yesterday, and here’s what’s new under the hood as compared to today’s SQL Server 2022 CU19. Forgive me – this is quite a lengthy post, and it’s mostly a data dump. There are new stored procedures, ex …
How to Migrate Data to a New SQL Server Database
This guide demonstrates how to efficiently migrate existing data, including data from SQLite, into a SQL Server database.
SQL Server 2022 on Ubuntu 24.04 step by step
Microsoft does not yet support this edition of Ubuntu, but there are some workarounds to make it work. This should not be used for production usage and this blog is for educational/testing purposes only. For my installation, I am using an AWS EC2 Ubunt …
First LLM Technical Editor Test – Office and Web-based Copilot with a VERY wrong article
Next up, I am going to give Microsoft Copilot its chance to check for technical inaccuracies in my obviously very wrong articles. This article is going to build upon the last two (You can see the series here.), and as I continue this series, I am going …
Fabric Is Just Plain Unreliable, and Microsoft’s Hiding It.
Last week, Microsoft Fabric went down yet again for hours on multiple continents. Oh, you didn’t hear about it? Let’s talk about why. First, Fabric’s status page is fabricated bullshit. The link https://aka.ms/fabricsupport takes you to a localized sta …