Sql-Server

Today, I was editing some SQL code using the SQL editor in a Microsoft Fabric Warehouse.

I needed to reorder a list of columns.

I find that a pretty frustrating editor but usually I can avoid it by connecting with SSMS. But for some reason, SSMS decided it didn’t want to connect to the warehouse today either.

No problems, I thought I’ll just edit the code with a combination of SSMS, and Excel (to reorder the column names), and then paste the code back into the Fabric SQL editor. But every time I did that, I ended up with a bunch of strange orange boxes all throughout the code.

2026-10-23

Over the years, I’ve had a surprising number of questions on how to output all the data in a table as a series of INSERT statements. SQL Server Management Studio has had the ability to do this for a long time. Here’s an example.

In Object Explorer, I’ve expanded the WideWorldImporters database, then expanded Tables. Where people come unstuck is they right-click the table, and look at the scripting options:

2026-10-19

Version 28 of our free SDU Tools for developers and DBAs is now released and winging their way out to our SDU Insiders.

You can find details on the tools here .

If you haven’t been using SDU Tools yet, I’d suggest downloading them and taking a look. At the very least, it can help when you’re trying to work out how to code something in T-SQL.

This is a huge release of the tools.

2026-10-13

There are a few places in T-SQL where instead of a time value, you need to work with a duration.

An example is if I want to sleep for a short period. In T-SQL, we can do that with the WAITFOR statement, used like this:

This command would cause SQL Server to wait for 10 minutes. One of the challenges though, is how do I create this duration string in a programmatic way? For example, how do I create the string ‘00:02:00’ if I’m starting with a value of 120 seconds?

2026-10-11

I have previously posted information about how to get local date and time happening in Azure SQL Database. Many people have been frustrated about the inability to set any date and time to work with, rather than just UTC.

I posted here about calculating it, and here about how to set it for your session.

While the workarounds were helpful, there were many situations where they just weren’t enough. One simple example is where you’re offering a Software as a Service (SaaS) application and want each tenant database to have its own date and time configuration, but many other people just wanted their database to reflect their own local time.

2026-10-09

I’ve done a lot of Microsoft exams over the years, mostly SQL Server ones but plenty of others too. And one thing that I really don’t like is when the questions are:

• Purely academic (ie: would never happen)
• Memory-based (ie: who cares what a particular limit is for a particular SKU today?)
• Clearly not written by someone who actually uses the product

Today, I want to mention an item in the last category.

2026-10-01

One question that I’m asked all the time when consulting is whether reducing the size of database tables will make queries run faster or not.

The underlying question is typically about whether the client should implement some sort of archiving strategy, to reduce the amount of data in a table by moving older data off into another table.

My answer is that it might help, but if it does, you probably have another issue that would be a better one to solve instead.

2026-09-29

I’m involved in a lot of performance tuning work for SQL Server based applications. These are mostly your typical OLTP accounting, financial, or record keeping applications. One thing that constantly surprises me is that many developers and DBAs really aren’t sure about where their tuning efforts need to be focused.

In particular, what really surprises me is how much focus most people have on write/update behavior and how little on read behavior. I think there’s a perception problem.

2026-09-27

In an earlier post , I discussed the design of EAV (Entity Attribute Value) tables, and looked at why they get used. I’d like to spend a few moments now looking at the pros and cons of these designs.

Let’s use the same table as the last time as an example:

Pros

The main positive that’s typically described is that the schema is flexible. By this, the developers usually mean I don’t have to change the database schema (or worse, have someone else change it) when my needs change.

2026-09-21

If you’ve been working with databases for any length of time, you will have come across implementations of Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) tables (or non-tables as some of my friends would call them).

Instead of storing details of an entity as a standard relational table, rows are stored for each attribute.

For example, let’s create a table of people:

USE tempdb;
GO

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS dbo.StaffMembers;
GO

CREATE TABLE dbo.StaffMembers
(
    StaffMemberID int NOT NULL
        CONSTRAINT PK_dbo_StaffMembers PRIMARY KEY,
    FullName nvarchar(100) NOT NULL,
    HairColor nvarchar(20) NULL,
    StartDate date NULL,
    LoyaltyPoints int NULL
);
GO

INSERT dbo.StaffMembers
(
    StaffMemberID, FullName, HairColor, StartDate, LoyaltyPoints
)
VALUES
(1, N'Fred Nurk', N'Blonde', '20250705', 3),
(2, N'Siew Yu Hock', N'Black', '20250709', 2),
(3, N'Abhishek Newma', N'Brown', '20250802', 2);
GO

When we query it, all is as expected:

2026-09-19