If you are aware of Betteridge’s law of headlines , you already know the answer, but let me explain.
There are a lot of odd myths that surround SQL Server. One of the more persistent ones is related to indexes on columns that hold bit values.
A SQL Server column that’s a bit can be in three states. It can have the value zero; it can have the value one; and it can be NULL (ie: have no value at all).
2026-09-11
Was 2018 a leap year?
What about the year 2000?
Will 2100 be a leap year?
When I was a young student at school, we learned that leap years were every four years. Then as I got older, I learned that there was more to it than that.
It’s important to understand that any calendar is just an approximation, and there is a lot more to calendars than most people realize.
2026-09-09
I’ve never liked how the LEN function works in T-SQL for SQL Server.
To test out what others thought, I recently posted a short quiz on my social networks. Here’s the question:
What would you expect the output from this query to be?
DECLARE @Value1 varchar(10) = 'Hello ';
DECLARE @Value2 varchar(10) = 'There ';
SELECT LEN(@Value1), LEN(@Value2), LEN(@Value1 + @Value2);
Nothing tricky. The first value has 3 trailing spaces. The second value has one.
Then I gave the following answer options:
2026-09-03
I see so much written about how to scale SQL Server systems, and this generally starts with needing to improve SQL Server database performance. When I read articles from the SQL Server field support teams with titles like Top 10 Performance Problems for SQL Server, I often just smile.
The problem is one of perspective. If you are looking at the performance problems that are brought to the support teams to solve, you get a very, very skewed view of what’s typical.
2026-08-26
Way back in SQL Server 2012, a whole raft of new T-SQL functions were introduced. As I’ve mentioned before, I get excited when there are new T-SQL functions.
Some of the ones added back then, I wasn’t so excited about. EOMONTH was in that category, not because of the functionality, but because of the name (wish it was ENDOFMONTH or better, END_OF_MONTH), and lack of symmetry (lack of a STARTOFMONTH or BEGINNINGOFMONTH).
2026-08-24
For general index maintenance, our friend Old Hallengren has an awesome solution for most people: https://ola.hallengren.com/sql-server-index-and-statistics-maintenance.html
We started to have customers using clustered columnstore indexes from SQL Server 2014, and they needed to be treated differently. At the time, I checked Ola’s latest scripts to see what happens with columnstore indexes.
It appeared that the code ignored nonclustered columnstore indexes (ie: index type of 6), which made sense as we would potentially need to rebuild them whenever the data changes, and at the time, the table was read-only. So that made lots of sense. Fortunately, that limitation is now gone.
2026-06-21
It was great to catch up with Jerry Nixon today and to have him on a SQL Down Under podcast.
I recently had Jess Pomfret on a show, discussing Data API Builder. And the logical extension of that is to talk about SQL MCP Server.
Jerry is a Principal Product Manager for Data and AI at Microsoft.
He says he is focused on the developer persona to minimize onboarding friction and maximize value.
2026-05-26
It was great to catch up with Jess Pomfret today and to have her on a SQL Down Under podcast.
Jess is a Data Platform Engineer and a dual Microsoft MVP. She started working with SQL Server in 2011, and she says she enjoys the problem-solving aspects of automating processes with PowerShell.
Jess also enjoys contributing to dbatools and dbachecks, two open source PowerShell modules that aid DBAs with automating the management of SQL Server instances.
2026-05-05
Most SQL Server developers are aware that the EXEC statement can be used to:
And most understand that you can SELECT from a scalar user-defined function.
But the option that many people don’t seem to be aware of, is that you can also use EXEC to call a scalar function.
I remember noticing this in the documentation for the EXEC command some years back. Prior to that, it had never dawned on me that you could use EXEC to call a scalar UDF. It’s also in the oldest documentation that I was able to check, so I’d say it’s worked for a long time.
2026-04-12
The WITH EXECUTE AS clause was a great addition for defining stored procedures and functions, to change the execution context, just for the duration of the stored procedure or function. For example:
CREATE PROC SomeSchema.SomeProc
WITH EXECUTE AS USER = 'Fred'
AS
...
Mostly I use this with the OWNER option:
CREATE PROC SomeSchema.SomeProc
WITH EXECUTE AS OWNER
AS
...
It’s also useful during testing, where I can temporarily change my execution context during testing. For example:
EXEC AS USER = 'Fred';
\-- Try some code here while running as Fred
REVERT;
But the option that most people don’t realize is possible, is that you can set the execution context for a single execution like this:
2026-04-10