Fabric has CI/CD built in, but if you've tried to use it for database deployments, you've probably already run into its limits. It's still very much in its infancy. The moment you change a column's length, drop a column, or remove a table that already contains data, the deployment fails — Fabric throws up a safety precaution and refuses to proceed. That's a reasonable default, but it stops real schema changes in their tracks. There could be ways around it — third-party tools

Index maintenance has always meant nightly jobs and a window you have to defend. Azure SQL’s new Automatic Index Compaction targets page density directly — so I tested it.

Compression was introduced in SQL Server version 2008. While it helped, the compression ratios were frequently too low to justify the...

Calling APIs directly from SQL Server has been available in Azure SQL DB since 2022, but now it's available in on-prem in SQL Server 2025...

Calling an API has been in Azure SQL since 2022, but it was only recently added to SQL Server 2025 Preview. This new feature...

When managing large databases or high-transactional databases, the performance of your underlying storage system is crucial, whether it...

Recently, one of my clients was experiencing performance issues with their SQL Server. Although the server was not underpowered from a...

A step-by-step guide to installing SQL Server 2025 Private Preview.

If you have SQL Server 2019 or SQL Server 2022 installed with PolyBase and you try to install SQL Server 2025, it will fail during...

How many of us have created a new table and used the default and first data type nvarchar for all of the text/alphanumeric fields, or had...

Creating a data warehouse can be challenging. Identifying the grain is one of the most important parts of having a quality data...

Since I first used Azure Data Factory, I looked for the 'disable' option on an activity, and it wasn't there! I quickly went to the ideas...

We have a date and are planning SQL Saturday Jacksonville's 15th Anniversary event! Since my recent but late post on how we ran SQL...

2022 is the first year post PASS and the SQLSaturday.com website containing the tools created by PASS for SQL Saturdays. So, I wanted to...

A new way to create the SpeedPass for SQL Saturday Events.

Recently I encountered a Microsoft SQL Server with relatively high and very consistent CPU usage with few peaks and valleys. When...

Over my years consulting, I've done quite a few performance tests for clients using DiskSpd (formally SQLIO), and I usually manually...

Bottom line? Don't use it! At least don't use it for a SQL cluster directly. Recently I stumbled on a configuration using S2D (Storage...

For VLDBs I've always created multiple files for each file group and had to set the trace flag 1117 on to ensure that all files grow at...

In this article, we will cover the specific steps to restore a set of TDE keys and a database to a new and or different server. This...