Chris Unwin describes a strategy, using data masking, cloned databases and PowerShell, which will allow you to sanitize data before provisioning test or development environments. Read more
SQL Prompt will warn you if it spots use of EXECUTE, without specifying the schema in which the stored procedure resides, because it can cause slower execution times, or even result in running of the wrong procedure. Read more
Jon Hayman shows you how to set up SQL Monitor to monitor Azure-based clustered SQL Server instances right alongside your on-premise clusters. Read more
Writing GROUPBY clauses is a very common, but tedious, activity for a SQL programmer. SQL Prompt will fill it in for you, with all non-aggregated columns returned by the query. Read more
Phil Factor shows how to use SQL Data Generator to produce as much pseudonymized data as you are likely to need for your testing, and then convert it to JSON so that you can also use it to test your MongoDB and Azure Cosmos databases, or to test out a new web service. Read more
Tony Davis takes a ‘first look’ at cloning databases with SQL Clone, reviewing some of the database provisioning challenges that we seek to overcome, explaining briefly how SQL Clone works, and then walking through a simple example of creating a clone from a live database. Read more
If you guard against database corruption by restoring backups to secondary server, licensed as per production, and then running DBCC CHECKDB integrity checks, then you might save a lot of restore time, and disk space, by offloading this task to a clone. Read more
Describing SQL Compare's built-in Active Directory Authentication mode, which makes it easier and more secure to, for example, deploy schema changes from version control to an Azure SQL Database. Read more
Phil Factor shares a SQL Prompt snippet called timings, which he uses as a standard testbed for getting execution times for procedures and functions. Read more