Sql-Server

(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

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

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 issue the following query against the dbo.Customers table:

SELECT * FROM dbo.Customers;

The table has a clustered index on the CustomerID column.

When you have not specified an ORDER BY clause, which order will the rows be returned in?

2025-11-29

Early versions of SSMS included the ability to work with source control systems. The way that worked was that SSMS implemented an SCCI (Source Code Control Interface). It would let you connect to any source control system that implemented that interface.

For a while, SSMS lost any ability to talk to source control. I thought that was a pity as I make extensive use of projects within SSMS and source control is where I want them stored.

2025-11-27

One change that was applied to Azure SQL Database a while back, and is coming in SQL Server 2025, is the use of ANSI string concatenation operators.

SQL Server has been using the + sign as a string concatenation operator since the early days, but that’s the same operator that’s used for numbers, and it’s not the ANSI standard. You’ll find that other database engines like PostgreSQL do not use + to join strings together; they use the || operator. I’ve been writing quite a lot of PostgreSQL lately, and avoiding using + to concatenate strings is always a challenge for my coding muscle memory.

2025-11-26

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:

A developer in your team has observed that your database servers are very I/O bound. He thinks the I/O is simply too slow.

What he’s suggesting is that you replace all use of temporary tables with table variables. His argument is that they are memory-based instead of disk-based and that this should help to reduce the I/O load. Your applications make heavy use of temporary tables, and most have large numbers of rows.

2025-11-25