Building Great Software
Steve notes that building great software isn't easy, and there is a lot of work that goes into this. Even in today's age of AI.
OUTER APPLY Fundamentals: Part 2
In Part 2 of this series we learn how OUTER APPLY can be used in your queries to return data, even when there are no matches between tables.
Create SQL Server 2025 Availability Groups with SSMS Wizard
SQL Server Availability Groups are great for DR and HA purposes. In this article, we look at how to setup a SQL Server 2025 Availability Group using the features in SQL Server Management Studio.
How to Work with On-Premises AI Models to Generate T-SQL Code
See how a small local model performs on some SQL tasks. This shows how Ollama can run a model on your laptop.
Imagine the Physical World
Today Steve notes that he often compares the work a computer does to what might happen if the same actions occurred in the physical world.
How SQL Server maintenance becomes an attack path – and what to do about it
The article covers four connected areas: over-privileged database users, msdb and SQL Server Agent exposure, privileged maintenance jobs, and trigger-based permission hijacking.
Managing Incidents and Fighting Fires
Managing incidents as a DBA /DB manager and some of the key things you should be doing.
BIT_COUNT in SQL Server
Learn how the BIT_COUNT() function works and how it enabled operations where data is stored in bits.
Power BI Best Practices
In this tip, we’ll look at some best practices to help you get the most out of your models. We will also look the DAX formula language.
Blogs
The SUM of Nothing: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
I caught this interesting item over on Pinal Dave’s blog: Eleven Interview Questions that...
How to Move the SSMS Status Bar to the Top and Color-Code SQL Server Connections
By Hemantgiri
I use color-coded connections in SSMS to distinguish Production, Pre-Production, UAT, and Development. But...
Forums
Split Large Queries in Athena with a Simple Modulo Trick
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Split Large Queries in Athena...
Finding Trailing Spaces
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Finding Trailing Spaces
Question of the Day
Finding Trailing Spaces
I have some data in a SQL Server 2025 database. It looks like this for the dbo.Customer table:
CustomerID CustomerName PreferredName 1 Steve Steve 2 Andy Andy 3 Brian Brian 4 Allan Allan 5 Devin Devin 6 Steve Steve 7 Sally SallyI want to detect which names have a single trailing space. The CustomerName is a varchar() and the PreferredName is a CHAR(). Does this query detect the problem rows?
SELECT
CustomerID,
CustomerName,
PreferredName
FROM Customer
WHERE CustomerName <> RTRIM(CustomerName)
OR PreferredName <> RTRIM(PreferredName); See possible answers 