The Bit Bucket

This is a post in the SQL Interview series. These aren’t trick or gotcha questions, they’re just questions designed to scope out a candidate’s knowledge around SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.

Section: Development Level: Medium

Question:

If you have two values where you want to return the first if it’s not NULL, and otherwise return the second, is there any difference at all between using the ISNULL and COALESCE functions?

2025-12-09

Anyone who has worked with SSMS for long, will have the experience of opening a number of query windows for short-term work, not wanting to save the scripts, and then being unable to find the one they want in the drop-down list of scripts:

The alternative to this was to save them all somewhere so you could give them a name. Then you need to clean them all up later.

2025-12-08

(Thanks to Klaus Oberdalhoff for this one)

Klaus noted that when EDIT TOP n is used, only the result is displayed. That’s different to the SELECT TOP n option where the query appears as well and can be edited.

However, after executing EDIT Top n, in the table displayed, right-click and you’ll see a menu item for Pane.

The sub-menu has the following options:

• Diagram - Shows the underlying table as a database diagram
• Criteria - Shows the graphical query editor
• SQL - The SQL script that was used to open the editor
• Results - Hides or shows the editable table

Diagram

This option leads to a database diagram like this:

2025-12-07

This is a post in the SQL Interview series. These aren’t trick or gotcha questions, they’re just questions designed to scope out a candidate’s knowledge around SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.

Section: Development Level: Medium

Question:

If you pass the following string to SQL Server, will it always reliably be understood as 7th October 2025 by the date, datetime, and datetime2 data types?

'2025-10-07'

If not, why not?

Answer:

No, while that is true for date, and datetime2, the value that will be cast for the datetime data type depends upon the regional settings. For example, in British English, a string in the format ‘XXXX-XX-XX’ will be read as ‘YYYY-DD-MM’.

2025-12-06

(Thanks to César F. for this one)

If you are working with many script files and they are all over your disk/storage, it can be painful to need to keep navigating whenever you want to open one.

However, when you use the File > Open > File option in SSMS, the dialog that opens up is capable of opening operating system shortcuts, and not just files. This means that you can have a folder of shortcuts and every time you need to open one of these files, you can just have it open the same location.

2025-12-05

Recently, I read a news report about a study that concluded that cybersecurity training doesn’t work. I can’t say that I’m surprised by that.

I spend a lot of time mentoring on client sites, and many of the clients are large organizations. Often these organizations require me to attend “training” on a regular basis, to satisfy their corporate compliance goals.

I don’t mind doing this at all, even though it’s incredibly repetitive. The course on conflicts of interest, or handling private or sensitive data, or IT security at company A is invariably almost word for word the equivalent course that I do at company B, and company C.

2025-12-04

This is a post in the SQL Interview series. These aren’t trick or gotcha questions, they’re just questions designed to scope out a candidate’s knowledge around SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.

Section: Administration Level: Medium

Question:

The table dbo.Customers has a clustered index CX_dbo_Customers on the CustomerID column. It also has two non-clustered indexes. One is on the CustomerName column and has an included column of PhoneNumber. The other non-clustered index is on the CityName column.

2025-12-03

I recently upgraded my laptop to Visual Studio 2026. The upgrade went quite smoothly except for one thing.

I received an error that told me that the RDLC Report Designer for use with SQL Server Reporting Services wasn’t going to work any more. In my case, we use that report viewer even without Reporting Services, by just uploading datasets in applications. I’ve found it very convenient. But I still needed the report designer so I could add new reports or change existing ones.

2025-12-02

This is an update of a post that I wrote for SQL Server 2022 . Unfortunately, those instructions needed to be updated, not because anything notable has changed in SQL Server 2025, but because the recent distribution of Python has changed. Thanks to Peter Bishop for reporting what was now missing.

R and Python in SQL Server

One of my more surprisingly popular blog posts in the past talked about Machine Learning: Testing ycd our installation of R and Python in SQL Server 2017. The problem is that SQL Server 2022 changed things, and then there is a further issue with the Python distribution.

2025-12-01

I recently listened (via Audible) to You Don’t Have to Have a Dream by Tim Minchin. I’m an unashamed fan of Tim’s and I was really pleased to see that he had published new content. Once again, a bonus was that Tim also narrated it. (I prefer books where the author reads it, not a hired voice actor).

Content

I was seriously surprised by how short this book was. I’m not sure how that made me feel: probably that I was hoping for more. This book is basically Tim repeating three graduation speeches that he’s given over the years, interspersed with some commentary about them. Generally, Tim tends to write fictional books.

2025-11-30