Michael Otey

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 backup job using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). The different ways to create SQL…

If most organizations understand the need to have a robust disaster recovery (DR) plan, IT Pros should also know that testing these plans is essential. If you don’t implement disaster recovery testing, you won’t know if your plans will work when you need them. And to properly test your DR plans, you may want to break them….

A self join in SQL Server is a useful statement to use for demonstrating relationships within a single SQL Server table database. In this tutorial, I’ll show you when and how to use an SQL self join. To do that, I’ll be detailing an sql self join example where I’ll list the supervisors for all…

In relational databases like SQL Server, the SQL JOIN statement is used to query, connect and retrieve data from multiple tables based on data relationships between those tables. You can use the SQL JOIN statement with two or more tables, and it essentially returns records that have matching values in the different tables. In this…

In this article, I’ll cover the basics of using the SQL SELECT statement to retrieve data from one or more SQL Server tables. I’ll also detail how to retrieve selected columns, as well as how to use the SQL WHERE and HAVING clauses to filter rows. The samples in this article all use the AdventureWorksLT2019…

SQL Server sample databases can be very useful for learning new techniques or trying out various samples of code. In this article, I’ll detail what you can do with the main SQL Server sample databases including Northwind, AdventureWorks, and WideWorldImporters. I’ll also show you how to find these SQL Server sample databases and install them….

Tables are one of the core components of every relational database system and SQL Server is no different. Tables store the data that the relational database engine uses for queries, reports, and other operations. In this article, I’ll show you how to modify data from a SQL Server table using T-SQL INSERT, T-SQL UPDATE, T-SQL…

ChatGPT has rapidly ushered AI into mainstream technology in a big way. Launched in November of 2022, ChatGPT has already garnered millions of users with its natural language AI-based responses to a huge variety of queries that range from writing term papers, articles, and software to answering emails, creating song lyrics, and even debugging many…

Almost every business knows that having a disaster recovery (DR) plan is essential. However, it’s equally important to test your disaster recovery plans, and not every business follows through on that point. In this article, I’m going to detail five essential disaster recovery test scenarios that your organization should consider to guarantee that its disaster…

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) now supports creating custom SQL Server database images using a Custom Engine Version (CEV). Businesses can use Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server using Custom Engine Version to build new custom images based on an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) with the required Windows operating system (OS), database customizations, and third-party…

Further fueling fears of a coming recession, Amazon has announced that it was laying off 18,000 of its employees. The 18,000 layoffs represent roughly 6 percent of Amazon’s workforce. Amazon, headquartered in Seattle, is the second largest employer in the US behind Walmart. The online retailer employs 1.5 million people globally. Most of the cuts…

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is without a doubt the world’s leading cloud services provider, and it’s still racing ahead of Microsoft’s Azure cloud and the Google Cloud Platform. However, not everyone may be familiar with AWS and its various services. In this article, we’ll try to answer some of the most common questions you may…