SQL Server is a big product, with lots of features. Many of the features—hopefully the vast majority of them—are solid and allow us to build trustworthy, secure, and reasonably usable database applications. But nearly everyone has stumbled into a few, shall we say, “darker areas” of the product now and again. Strange and seemingly...

I became a consultant a bit earlier in my career than was probably wise. The going was rough at first, with periods of feast and periods of famine. Although I had several clients, I didn’t understand how to sell services or schedule my workload, and so I’d wind up either doing huge amounts of...

SQL Server 2008 was perhaps not the meatiest of SQL Server releases, but it did have one especially promising feature: Data change detection. Or maybe two features, depending on how you look at things. I’m talking, of course, about the almost confusingly similarly named Change Data Capture and Change Tracking. ...

Sad that you missed last week's SQL Server 2016 "Hidden Gems" GroupBy session? Unlikely, perhaps...but no worries either way! It's now available for free, on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4608MNM-QU Enjoy!