Phil Factor's guide to taming SQL Prompt code layout options, and getting it to format code exactly the way you like it. Read more
Phil Factor uses Extended Events and a SQL Monitor custom metric to detect when the metadata of a database has 'drifted', meaning that a database object has been created, deleted or modified outside of the official change management process. Read more
Rodney Landrum describes how a monitoring tool must help us monitor, analyze and predict resource usage, including costs, across a growing and diversifying estate, and also help the organization to connect server resource usage and error conditions directly to their impact on business processes. Read more
If someone makes unauthorized changes to SQL Server configuration settings, it could compromise the availability, performance or security of your servers. Using using Extended Events, and a custom metric, in SQL Monitor, Phil Factor offers a way to get an immediate notification of such changes, and investigate their cause. Read more
Tony Davis explains how to resolve simple merge conflicts, such as conflicting changes to the same stored procedure, using SQL Source Control and a merge tool such as Beyond Compare. Read more
With SQL Prompt and Phil Factor's chk code snippet, you can, with a few clicks, get a list of all the SQL statements executed within a batch, in SSMS, their execution plans, and their execution statistics, such as duration, CPU, logical reads and so on. Read more
Phil Factor shows how to monitor for the errors indicative of a possible SQL Injection attack on one of your SQL Server databases, using a SQL Monitor custom metric that uses diagnostic data from Extended Events. Read more
Grant Fritchey explains how a modern monitoring tool must adapt, as our SQL Server databases grow in number and size, and migrate onto new cloud-based, containerized or virtual machine-based SQL Servers. Read more
How to use SQL Data Generator, and PowerShell to obfuscate personal data (names), while retaining the same distribution of data, so that the test database behaves like the original. Read more
Avoid using the IsNumeric() function, because it can often lead to data type conversion errors, when importing data. On SQL Server 2012 or later, use the Try_Convert() or Try_Cast() function instead. On earlier SQL Server versions, the only way to avoid it is by using LIKE expressions. Read more
