If you want to use TOP with an expression or subquery, or in INSERT, UPDATE, MERGE, and DELETE statements, then use of brackets is required, so it's a good habit to adopt everywhere. Read more
Steve Jones shares how he migrates his existing development databases to clones, using SQL Provision and a simple PowerShell function. Read more
How to automatically build multiple test databases, from source control, and then fill them with standard test data sets, using SQL Change Automation, BCP and some PowerShell magic. Read more
Steve Jones show how a team might use SQL Provision to build consistent, compliant, useful databases, on demand, for development and test environments. Read more
Provides a PowerShell automation script that will build a SQL Server database from the scripts in source control, document the database and then deploy it as a NuGet package, using it to update the schema of a live database. Read more
This article shows how to define SQL code analysis rules using SQL Prompt and them run them automatically from a PowerShell script, displaying the detected code issues in a handy HTML report. Read more
Redgate Monitor tells us immediately when significant blocking occurs, and where, during busy periods, and provides the full blocking chain, in an easy-to-digest graphical format, so we can diagnose and resolve the blocking quickly. Read more
Steve Jones shows how to get SQL Data Compare to synchronize custom error messages, stored in the sys.messages system catalog view, across SQL Server instances. This can be a handy way of ensuring your DR and HA instances keep their messages in sync. Read more
Using TOP in a SELECT statement, without a subsequent ORDER BY clause, is legal in SQL Server, but meaningless because asking for the TOP x rows implies that the data is guaranteed to be in a certain order, and tables have no implicit logical order. You must specify the order. Read more
Phil Factor demonstrates the use of temporary tables and table variables, and offers a few simple rules to decide if a table variable will give better performance than a temp table (ST011), or vice-versa (ST012). Read more
