SQL Server

Tune in here to watch our webcast video for this week! To join our weekly webcast for live Q&A, make sure to watch the video by 12:00 PM EST on Tuesday, September 16! Not only do we answer your questions, we also give away a prize at 12:25 PM EST – don’t miss it! Curious how…

Until now, SQL Server training usually meant registering for a course, showing up, hearing a lecture from a podium (often from someone who’s only done demos on their laptop, not production systems), working through a few workshops, and then going home with a bunch of ideas. It was like trying to ride a rollercoaster by…

You love Q&A sites like StackOverflow.com and DBA.StackExchange.com, but sometimes it’s hard to find interesting questions that need to be answered. So many people just sit around hitting refresh, knocking out the new incoming questions as soon as they come in. What’s a database person to do? Use the power of the SQL. Data.StackExchange.com lets…

We always like to innovate — not just with the solutions we design for our consulting customers and in how we teach, but in our free videos, too. Our YouTube channel has become super popular. Lots of folks watch the recordings of our live webcasts. We stopped recently and asked, “How can we make this even…

The only thing you ever need to use for database identity is an IDENTITY, right? Well, maybe. There are a lot of different options and they all have different pros and cons. IDENTITY columns The default way to identify objects in SQL Server is to use an INT or BIGINT column marked as an IDENTITY. This guarantees relatively sequential numbers, barring…

“Enterprise Edition was installed for SQL Server, but it turns out that we only have a license for Standard Edition. Is that an easy change?” I see this question a lot. The answer is well documented by Microsoft, but it seems to be really hard for folks to find! If you’d like to go straight…

I’ve worked with a lot of features in SQL Server. I know what I think is tricky and more difficult than it looks like at first. But experiences vary, right? So I asked the Twitterverse, “What are the Top 3 Trickiest Features in SQL Server?”  Here’s what I heard back. #1: Replication SQL Server Replication “wins”…

A team challenge in our training in Chicago, 2013 As teachers, we’re always working to maximize the skills that students can learn in a given amount of time. Many students “learn by doing.” But what’s the best way to do this? You may immediately think of lab exercises as an option. But labs are treacherous to implement…