Sql-Server

I’ve been learning Mandarin (Chinese) for many, many years. I’m determined to become as fluent in speaking as I can, but to also be reasonable at reading and writing.

One important aspect of doing this, is to make sure you use the language you are learning as much as possible.

A great advantage of SSMS is that it is available for use in many languages. Yet when you do this, SSMS ends up supporting both the target language and English. That means that I can work part of the time in Chinese (to force myself to learn) and the rest of the time in English.

2025-10-22

We spend a lot of time doing performance tuning work for clients. Inappropriate indexing strategy is often high on the list of issues that we identify. Most of these issues can’t be fixed by SQL Server itself and require a detailed understanding of both how the tables are structured and how they are accessed.

However, there is one very common problem however that I believe SQL Server could assist with.

2025-10-21

SSMS has a concept of channels that are used to control releases of the product. You can find them described here .

You can have both Release and Preview channels installed on the same system.

Most people who are using the product in production scenarios want to have a supported stable release. They should use the Release Channel .

Other people, however, are keen to try the latest features as soon as they are available, even if they aren’t at a Release quality bar yet. They can use the Preview Channel .

2025-10-20

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:

What are mirrored backups?

Do they increase or decrease the reliability of backups?

Answer:

Mirrored backups cause the same backup data to be written to multiple locations.

They decrease the reliability of backups, because if writing to any location fails, all backups fail.

2025-10-19

In the current version of SSMS, there is an option to provide feedback directly to the SSMS team. While you can just browse to the website, you can click this link in the top right-hand side.

At that point, you are given three options:

The first two end up in very similar locations, just with a different preselected context:

Make sure you search first to see if the problem has already been reported. As soon as you provide a title for your issue, the site does a search and shows you issues that are potentially related. If you see the same issue, you can click on it to go to the discussion and add your own comments there.   If the issue hasn’t already been reported, you can create a new issue. Make sure you provide a clear title, then detailed information about how to reproduce the issue. Finally, before submitting, make sure you indicate the impact you are experiencing:

2025-10-18

In SQL Server versions prior to SQL Server 2008, the database engine had always tried to provide balanced performance to all concurrent users. Most DBAs however have come across situations where they have wished they had control over the priority assigned to users or workloads as the balanced approach that SQL Server provided might not have suited their business needs.

Way back in SQL Server 2008, Microsoft introduced the concept of resource governance and allowed us to exercise a degree of control in this area. The implementation still has a number of limitations but what was supplied was sufficient to deal a large number of common scenarios. As an example of how this technology might be used, I’ll describe a scenario that I commonly encounter.

2025-10-17

When you start SSMS, the default action at startup is to open Object Explorer. But you can change that behavior. The options to do that are in Tools. Options, then Environment, and Startup.

These are the options that are provided:

One that is often surprisingly useful is to open an empty environment. You might want to use SSMS to edit files without any connection to a database and not want to waste time waiting for SSMS to open the connection dialog, just for you to close it again.

2025-10-16

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:

What are striped backups and why would you use them?

What do they need to be effective?

Answer:

Striped backups cause stripes of the backup to be written to multiple files. This is done to increase performance.

2025-10-15

One challenge that I find with T-SQL is that there’s no 100% reliable way to drop a database.

I wish I was joking.

If you execute DROP DATABASE, the command will fail if anyone is connected to the database. The way that we normally drop databases is as follows:

USE master;
GO  

IF EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM sys.databases AS d WHERE d.[name] = N'somedb')
BEGIN
    ALTER DATABASE somedb SET SINGLE_USER WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE;
    DROP DATABASE somedb;
END;

That mostly works, but the problem is that I need to execute the command from the master database. That means that when I set the database to single user, I don’t know that I’m the single user. What I’ve seen happen sometimes, is that the Intellisense system in SSMS is reading further down my script, where I’m perhaps recreating the database, and it’s maintaining a connection to the DB.

2025-10-14

This is the eleventh tale in a series of stories about data. I hope you enjoy the series.

Recently, I’ve written a series of articles on how the overall size of a financial services database was tamed by the application of table compression, XML compression, and PDF size reduction. I have applied this approach at many sites but recently came across one where the outcome seemed to constantly be getting worse rather than better. Every time I tried to improve the situation, it got worse. Let’s discuss why.

2025-10-13