Blog

  • T-SQL Tuesday 104 – Capture expensive queries with query store

    For this month’s T-SQL Tuesday Bert Wagner invites us to share SQL scripts we’ve written that we’d hate to live without. Code You Would Hate To Live Without (T-SQL Tuesday #104 Invitation) I don’t know that I’d go quite as far as “hate”, but I’ve been getting a lot of re-use out of a script Read more

  • Alter Multiple Databases at Once

    This is a quick and dirty method I often use when I want to make a change to multiple databases on a SQL Server instance, usually based on a criteria. It’s a fairly basic level thing to do, and while it is probably trivial to a SQL expert, I find most beginners wouldn’t consider it. Read more

  • Cycle Through Your Clipboard History In SSMS

    This is my favourite SSMS trick I’ve discovered recently, probably some time towards the end of last year. Basically, when you paste in Management Studio, you have not just the option to paste the last thing you selected and copied, but can cycle back through previous things that were in the clipboard. In a quick Read more

  • The Importance of ORDER BY

    Everyone, at the beginning of their SQL career, get’s told that it is important to include an ORDER BY if they want the results ordered. Otherwise the order in which they are returned is not guaranteed. But then you run queries a lot of times that don’t need a specific order – and you see Read more

  • Thoughts on Query Performance with TDE enabled

    Microsoft state that enabling TDE (Transparent Data Encryption) usually has a performance  overhead of 2-4%. That doesn’t sound like very much, and personally I wouldn’t let it bother me if I want to make sure my data is encrypted at rest. However, you may have heard other sources saying that it’s actually a lot more Read more

  • Hitting my first big blogging milestone – 100k Reads

    After blogging about SQL Server for just over a year, at some in the last month I went over 100,000 reads in total for my blog posts. That breaks down today as about 17,500 reads on my WordPress site, and 89,000 on SQL Server Central where my blog is syndicated, across 52 posts. I’m sure Read more