Data doesn’t always come in a nice, neat, relational format. Oftentimes it’s unstructured files like Word documents or images. But it still needs to be stored in some manner, right? In previous versions of SQL Server, you could store this kind of data in the database using varbinary or image columns. Another alternative was keep […]
Hierarchies. Asymmetric keys. Symmetric keys. Certificates. Algorithms. Authenticators. Encrypting your data can seem like a very daunting and confusing process. On the one hand, you want your data to be secure. But on the other hand, you still want good performance. And, no pressure, but fail to plan properly and your data becomes completely unreadable. […]
Today’s episode of SQL Server A to Z is brought to you by the letter D. D is for Dynamic Management View (DMV). DMVs were introduced in SQL 2005 as a way to provide administrators with a window into what’s going on in SQL Server at any given moment. This can range from OS statistics, […]
One of the first decisions you need to make when installing SQL Server is to select a collation for the instance. Most of the time we simply choose the default and breeze on by. But do you really know all the effects that choice has on your database and the applications that run against it? […]
Once a month, on the 2nd Tuesday, the SQL Server online community has a virtual party of sorts called T-SQL Tuesday. T-SQL Tuesday was started by Adam Mechanic (blog|twitter) back in 2009 and has been going strong ever since. This month, I decided to crash the party with a submission of my own. The topic-du-jour […]
