Sql-Server

Years ago, I had the privilege of presenting “what’s new in SQL Server” sessions at many locations around the world. When presenting sessions, you can sometimes learn as much as you teach. What I learned while delivering those sessions is that the product group sees what’s important in a release very differently to what the attendees do.

Each time there’s a new version of SQL Server, there will normally be three or four marketing pillars (groups of functionality), and each will have about eight to ten bullet points.

2025-06-18

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 are writing Azure SQL Database code that needs to concatenate strings.

You have previously used the + operator to do this.

Which other operator can be used for concatenating strings?

Answer:

Azure SQL Database supports the double-pipe || operator for string concatenation.

2025-06-17

In another section, I’ve described ways to configure the scroll bar in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). There is another key option that I haven’t discussed previously: map mode. By default, the scroll bar shows the changes, syntax errors, etc:

If you have a long script though, it can be hard to visualize what’s in the other parts of the script. Map mode can help with this.

Right-click the scroll bar and choose Scroll Bar Options:

2025-06-16

If you’ve installed the public preview of SQL Server 2025, you will have noticed that the list of free editions that you can install, has increased.

Instead of just Evaluation, Developer, and Express, the list is now as shown above, with Developer split into Standard Developer and Enterprise Developer.

While the naming of the new editions sound like they are describing the person using them, they are about the included features.

2025-06-15

In an earlier post, I described how I didn’t particularly like all the colors that are shown in the scroll bar now in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS):

In that post, I described how to turn them all off, or at least how to kill off some of them. But, of course they are there for a reason.

Instead of turning them all off, you might decide to make sense of what they are there for. The colors that are displayed indicate the following:

2025-06-14

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 have code that uses transactions.

There is an outer transaction that contains an inner transaction.

If the inner transaction code executes a ROLLBACK, what is rolled back? Is it the inner transaction, the outer transaction, or both?

2025-06-13

It’s great that SQL Server Management Studio has moved into the latest Visual Studio shell. Unfortunately, there are one or two things that are a little harder at first for people who want to use SSMS to write T-SQL. One that was driving me crazy was the scroll bar.

Visual Studio tries to give so much information on that bar, about what’s changed, where the insertion carat is, etc. The problem with this is that I often now can’t even find the handle when I want to scroll the window. For example, how do you grab the handle with your mouse and slide the window when it looks like this?

2025-06-12

I can’t tell you how many SQL Server articles that I’ve read that suggests that AUTO_CLOSE is a completely evil option. I understand the sentiment, but is that really true? If so, why does it exist in the first place?

What is the AUTO_CLOSE option?

When SQL Server is started, it normally opens all database files that are meant to be ONLINE, and it keeps them open until you shut down.

2025-06-11

SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is a highly configurable tool. One of the areas that’s often ignored but which can be quite important is color configuration.

SSMS color codes SQL scripts (and other types of files that it understands) as you type.

This is really useful but I’ve found on some systems that some of the color selections aren’t great. Here’s an example:

On many systems that I work with, depending upon the version, the color for sys.tables in the query above is quite a fluoro green and almost unreadable. The default from v21 onwards is much better but if you don’t like it, you can change it.

2025-06-10

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: Administrtaion Level: Advanced

Question:

You have deployed a database application into production.

Soon after, you get reports that large numbers of deadlocks are occurring.

What is the most important first step in resolving deadlocks?

Answer:

While it might appear that looking into locking processes, etc. is critical, it is pointless reviewing these until you are certain that queries on the system are running efficiently.

2025-06-09