The Bit Bucket

Years ago, I was a trainer for the Microsoft SQL Server Master’s program at their headquarters in Redmond. In one of the labs, I asked the students to set up database mirroring on a TDE-encrypted database. It was fascinating to watch them try to set it up.

It’s important to realize that the students in the room were all Premier Field Engineers and senior consultants from Microsoft and from some large partner companies. The students were all very experienced with the product. Yet it often took many of them quite a while to work out how to set it up.

2025-08-10

In T-SQL, a script is a set of one or more batches.

For example, if we have the following script and click Execute, it looks like all the commands were sent to the server and executed all at once:

But that isn’t what happened.

What did happen is that SSMS found the word GO and broke the script into a series of batches. In this case, there were three batches. First, it sent the commands shown here as Batch 1 to the server, waited for them to execute, then sent Batch 2, waited for it to execute, then sent Batch 3, and waited for it to execute.

2025-08-09

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