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: Administration Level: Intro

Question:

You have a database configured for simple recovery model. You notice that the transaction log is still increasing in size.

What could cause this?

Answer:

Even in the Simple recovery model, it is quite normal to see the transaction log file grow. That does not necessarily mean it’s stuck or misconfigured.

2026-01-12

When we talk about real-time, it’s worth asking: why does it matter so much? The answer is that in many situations, timing is everything. Traditional business reports are incredibly valuable, but they often arrive hours or days after the fact.

By the time you’ve spotted the issue, the opportunity to act has already passed.

Take fraud detection as an example. If a customer’s credit card is being misused, you can’t afford to wait until the next daily reconciliation. By then, dozens of fraudulent purchases might have gone through. Real-time intelligence means the system can detect unusual patterns on the spot and stop the fraud before it escalates.

2026-01-11

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:

You are reviewing the memory usage of a Windows Server running SQL Server. It appears to have almost run out of memory.

You add additional memory, and monitor the usage of the memory by SQL Server. It appears to always be constantly increasing, until the server is almost out of memory again.

2026-01-10

This is the start of a new series of blog posts dedicated to Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence or RTI. I think RTI is an important aspect of Microsoft Fabric, yet it is currently underutilized. I hope to try to help change that.

So why, RTI ?

Let’s start with a simple idea. Real time intelligence (or RTI) is about shrinking the delay between when data is created and when you can act on it. In traditional systems, we’re often used to data being collected, stored, and only analyzed later, maybe overnight or even weekly. That’s fine for long term reporting, but it’s too slow for situations where immediate action matters.

2026-01-09

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: Intro

Question:

You are reviewing the design of a database and note that in the dbo.Customers table, there is a column called CustomerTimestamp that has the timestamp data type.

Can you extract the date from the CustomerTimestamp column by using the CONVERT function?

2026-01-08

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:

You are tracing queries using Extended Events. Two queries have exactly the same execution plan, and the same plan costs. In the trace, one query showed a duration of 2 minutes. The other query showed a duration of over an hour.

2026-01-07

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: Administration Level: Intro

Question:

You successfully create a full backup of a database that is in full recovery model.

As part of the backup, is the transaction log shrunk?

Answer:

No — a full database backup does not shrink or truncate the transaction log.

2026-01-06

I can’t tell you how many sessions for developers that I have attended, where the demonstration shows an application connecting to a database as the database owner (dbo) or as a system administrator (like sa). Are we then surprised when developers do this in their own applications?

Please don’t do this.

If you’re running a utility application that’s only used by administrators, and is run within a secure part of the environment, that might be ok. But for normal user applications, it’s just not safe to do so, and it’s really poor practice.

2026-01-05

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: Intro

Question:

You are configuring database mail so that applications can send emails.

Does database mail have a dependency on Microsoft Exchange ?

Answer:

No, Database Mail does not depend on Microsoft Exchange.

Database Mail in SQL Server:

2026-01-04

If you are working with really long script files in SSMS, you might need to work on more than one part of the script at the same time. Perhaps you need to work on a function, and also on the code that calls the function.

On the Window menu, there is a Split option.

When you first do this, you’ll see a split window with the same query at top and bottom:

2026-01-03