Finding a new job can be a long and stressful proposition. This holds true even for skilled candidates. And even for skilled candidates in an atmosphere like we have in 2017—in which everyone who is employable is, for the most part, employed, and IT positions often stay open for months due to a lack...

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!

Today I was honored to present my SQL Server 2016 “Hidden Gems” talk for the GroupBy online conference. The slide deck and demos are attached to this post. Following are some links to help you in further exploration of...

At some point a long time ago, when I was first getting serious about SQL Server, I became aware of an open secret. You see, there was this special Microsoft alias called “sqlwish.” Those in the know could send an e-mail and pass along suggestions for improving the product. And they wouldn’t...

Just over seven years ago (wow, does time fly!) I launched T-SQL Tuesday. The core idea is simple: Each month, one blogger acts as “host.” He or she is responsible for choosing an interesting topic in or related to the SQL Server realm. Then a bunch of other bloggers all write articles on that...

I've been thinking a lot about SQL Server 2016 temporal tables of late. I think it's possibly the most compelling feature in the release, with broad applications across a number of different use cases. However, just like any v.1 feature, it's not without its faults. I created a couple of new Connect items and decided to...

Over a year ago now I announced a rough port of sp_whoisactive to Azure SQL Database. This worked thanks to Microsoft finally aligning the Azure DMVs to the box product DMVs...until Microsoft decided to rip out one of the key DMVs, sys.dm_os_sys_info and its ms_ticks column. This column is the key to unlocking various...