Sql-Server

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 monitoring a SQL Server and you notice that tempdb is being heavily accessed. You know that your applications make very little use of temporary tables.

Can you give examples of other things that might be using tempdb.

2025-08-08

In an earlier post, I mentioned that you can create a registered list of servers, either in Local Server Groups or stored in a Central Management Server.

What I didn’t really talk about though, is what you can do with these groups of servers, rather than just executing queries on an individual server.

I’ve created three local server groups, for my development, UAT, and production servers.

The Development Servers group has two database servers in it. If I right-click the group, rather than any individual server, we get these options:

2025-08-07

You’d think SQL Server 2000 would be long gone by now, but recently I had to restore a SQL Server 2000 database, and get it working on SQL Server 2022.

Now extended support for SQL Server 2000 ended on 9th April 2013.

SQL Server 2000 came in several editions: Enterprise, Standard, Developer, Personal, and the Desktop Engine or MSDE. I’m guessing most people would forget that there was ever a Personal edition. Regardless, this database was from an application that used an embedded database attached to the Desktop Engine or MSDE.

2025-08-06

When working with SQL Server systems, it can be hard to remember the names of all the servers, to remember connection details for the ones that need SQL logins (instead of Windows authentication), and to remember other details of those servers, such as which environments they are part of (eg: production, UAT, test)

SSMS has a facility to help you to do this. It allows you to register server details in a single place.

2025-08-05

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: Development Level: Medium

Question:

You are working with an Azure SQL Database. When you display dates and times, you notice that they do not match your local time zone of CEST.

Can you change the server settings to Central European Standard Time (CEST)?

2025-08-04

I commonly run into a few connection-related scenarios:

• I’m working on a large query and need to run it against several servers, not concurrently, but one after the other.
• I’ve just made a database connection, and got my query ready, only to discover that I’ve connected to the wrong server.

Either way, what I’ve seen people do in these scenarios is to:

• Select all the text in the current query
• Copy it
• Open a new query window
• Paste the code

That’s all good but SSMS has had a simpler way of doing this for quite a while.

2025-08-03

There is a really common misconception about output order for T-SQL queries. I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard people say that if you don’t specify an ORDER BY clause, then you’ll see the rows returned in the order of the primary key.

The assumption they’re also making is that the primary key is the clustering key. And that’s not necessarily true either. You can have a non-clustered primary key on a table.

2025-08-02

Everyone who’s worked with SQL Server for any length of time, has had the experience of executing a T-SQL script, and then noticing, with horror, that they’ve just executed the script against the wrong server.

You know the feeling. It even happens at Christmas time, just when you were hoping to get away from work for a few days, or when you are the unlucky one who’s doing on call work.

2025-08-01

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: Advanced

Question:

A storage failure occurs and during recovery, a data file from your database was lost.

Transaction log backups are taken every 5 minutes.

Periodically, when data is being loaded into the database, Bulk Logged mode is used. At the time of the failure, the database was still in bulk logged mode.

2025-07-31

When I am writing my own code using a .NET (or other) language, I have a great deal of control of how the connection string that my application uses to connect to SQL Server is configured.

In particular, I might need to add another parameter or two.

As a simple example, I might be working with a multi-subnet Availability Group, spread across a production site and a disaster recovery site. It’s common to then have an Availability Group Listener in both subnets.

2025-07-30