SQL Server

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…

Azure Data Studio is a database management tool from Microsoft. It offers a modern and user-friendly UI for performing several database operations and building customizable dashboards. In this article, I’ll explain how Azure Data Studio works, how it differs from SQL Server Management Studio, and how you can download and install it on your PC….

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…

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…

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…

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…