Michael Otey

SQL Server’s T-SQL query language has a plethora of data retrieval options. That includes the ability to query a SQL database, as well as providing a sum function, a count aggregate function, and grouping columns. The SQL GROUP BY clause can make use of all of these capabilities. In this article, I’ll show you how…

If you’re following industry trends, there’s no doubt that generative AI is the hottest new technology of the past year. And with Microsoft, Google, and other major tech companies jumping on this generative AI bandwagon, this trend isn’t going to be abated anytime soon. In IT, a rapidly growing number of software vendors now have…

Microsoft has officially supported running SQL Server in a container since SQL Server 2017. Today, most support is for SQL Server on Linux containers, and Microsoft only supports SQL Server 2022 on Linux containers for production workloads. In this article, I’ll show you how to configure SQL Server Docker containers on Linux. Why would you…

Starting with SQL Server 2017, Microsoft has supported SQL Server on Linux, which has the same underlying database engine as the Windows version. In this article, I’ll show you how to install SQL Server on Linux, as well as Azure Data Studio. The most recent release of SQL Server is SQL Server 2022, which offers…

SQL Server Data Tools for Visual Studio 2022 (SSDT) is the modern replacement for Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS), which was introduced with SQL Server 2005. SQL Server Data Tools for Visual Studio 2022 is now delivered as a part of Visual Studio 2022, and it enables you to create and modify new projects for…

When working with SQL Server databases, the SQL COALESCE expression is commonly used to detect null values and provide a fallback or default value when dealing with nullable columns or expressions in SQL queries. It’s like a syntactic shortcut for the CASE expression, and it’s typically used to make subsequent calculations easier. In this article,…

The T-SQL LIKE operator is one of the most useful additions to the SQL SELECT statement. The latter retrieves a result set, and you can easily filter the results using equality operators and the WHERE clause to select certain specific conditions. But what about those times when you might want to select rows that are…

Microsoft’s SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is the primary tool for working with SQL Server databases. In this article, I’ll guide you through the steps you need to follow to download and install SQL Server Management Studio on your PC. What is SQL Server Management Studio? SQL Server Management Studio provides an integrated environment that…

SQL CROSS JOIN queries are used to generate a paired combination of each row of the first table with each row of the second table. This kind of result is called a Cartesian product. In this article, I’ll show you how to use an SQL CROSS JOIN. How does an SQL Cross Join work? The…

Creating backups is one of the most important duties of an SQL Server database administrator, and there are a number of different ways to back up your most important databases. In this article, I’ll explain how to create a simple SQL Server backup job using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). The different ways to create…