SQL Server

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…

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…

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…

I’ve added a lot of skills to my tech toolbox over the years, and I’ve found PowerShell to be the most useful addition. As my skills with PowerShell increased, I’ve looked to use it more. That’s a great thing, because PowerShell is so prolific on Microsoft systems today, that in many instances it’s become the primary way…

Designing a backup strategy in SQL is fairly straightforward, but it can get complicated when you’ve got a lot of moving pieces in your scenario. Sean McCown, Microsoft SQL MVP, takes the readers through the “best” practices to follow.

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…

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…

Microsoft has announced a new data protection feature for its SQL Server tool. The new capability enables organizations to classify and protect SQL Server data with Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) sensitivity labels. If you’re unfamiliar, Microsoft Information Protection is a unified solution that enables customers to discover, classify, and protect data based on its sensitivity…

The latest release of SQL Server 2019 has several important enhancements for high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR). Let’s take a look at some of the main HA and DR changes in SQL Server 2019.