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 CPU of a SQL Server is at 2%. Very little I/O is happening.
A query has been running for a long time, and seems stuck i.e., doesn’t seem to be doing anything, what’s likely to be the issue?
2025-06-21
SSMS is a great tool and it has lots of helpful menu items and toolbar items. Unfortunately, all these items take up screen real estate.
Even though you can get more screen real estate for editing, by unpinning the windows on each side, you can see that the default screen layout could be considered a bit cluttered if you really just want to focus on the particular query that you’re working on.
2025-06-20
A few days ago, I wrote about the new Standard Developer Edition of SQL Server 2025 and what good news it was. I noted that the need for it had reduced since SQL Server 2016 SP1 but it was still helpful.
While the product group management did a good job with SQL Server 2016 SP1, others in the product group don’t seem to have remembered those lessons. The team keeps releasing features that only work on particular SKUs of Azure SQL Database.
2025-06-19
Years ago, I had the privilege of presenting “what’s new in SQL Server” sessions at many locations around the world. When presenting sessions, you can sometimes learn as much as you teach. What I learned while delivering those sessions is that the product group sees what’s important in a release very differently to what the attendees do.
Each time there’s a new version of SQL Server, there will normally be three or four marketing pillars (groups of functionality), and each will have about eight to ten bullet points.
2025-06-18
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 writing Azure SQL Database code that needs to concatenate strings.
You have previously used the + operator to do this.
Which other operator can be used for concatenating strings?
Answer:
Azure SQL Database supports the double-pipe || operator for string concatenation.
2025-06-17
In another section, I’ve described ways to configure the scroll bar in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). There is another key option that I haven’t discussed previously: map mode. By default, the scroll bar shows the changes, syntax errors, etc:
If you have a long script though, it can be hard to visualize what’s in the other parts of the script. Map mode can help with this.
Right-click the scroll bar and choose Scroll Bar Options:
2025-06-16
If you’ve installed the public preview of SQL Server 2025, you will have noticed that the list of free editions that you can install, has increased.
Instead of just Evaluation, Developer, and Express, the list is now as shown above, with Developer split into Standard Developer and Enterprise Developer.
While the naming of the new editions sound like they are describing the person using them, they are about the included features.
2025-06-15
In an earlier post, I described how I didn’t particularly like all the colors that are shown in the scroll bar now in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS):
In that post, I described how to turn them all off, or at least how to kill off some of them. But, of course they are there for a reason.
Instead of turning them all off, you might decide to make sense of what they are there for. The colors that are displayed indicate the following:
2025-06-14
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 have code that uses transactions.
There is an outer transaction that contains an inner transaction.
If the inner transaction code executes a ROLLBACK, what is rolled back? Is it the inner transaction, the outer transaction, or both?
2025-06-13
It’s great that SQL Server Management Studio has moved into the latest Visual Studio shell. Unfortunately, there are one or two things that are a little harder at first for people who want to use SSMS to write T-SQL. One that was driving me crazy was the scroll bar.
Visual Studio tries to give so much information on that bar, about what’s changed, where the insertion carat is, etc. The problem with this is that I often now can’t even find the handle when I want to scroll the window. For example, how do you grab the handle with your mouse and slide the window when it looks like this?
2025-06-12
