Hidden tables in SSMS: detect and create them!
Did you know hidden tables may be lurking in your database? SQL Server Management Studio is a world-class database management toolset, and includes some really great features. Arguably the most-used feature is the Object Explorer…
Data Masking is not enough to protect personal information from prying eyes!
Data Masking is the process of either obfuscating or replacing personally identifying information with meaningless data that cannot be used to identify the items being masked. The data masking process is frequently used to alter…
ALTER TABLE ALTER COLUMN failed because one or more objects access this column
There are a variety of causes for the message shown in the title of this post. Manually creating statistics for a column is one such cause. This post shows how that works, and what you…
Can statistics be updated for objects in read-only filegroups?
DBA.StackExchange.com has an interesting question about the benefits of filegroups and setting filegroups to read-only which I recently answered. I made several assumptions about read-only filegroups that turned out to be incorrect, one of which…
SQL Server Timer Source
Recently, I’ve been looking for a way to better understand timings on SQL Server, and have been intrigued to see that SQL Server can use one of several different mechanisms to determine precision and resolution…
Use DBCC PAGE to identify rows involved in blocking operations in SQL Server
Recently, one of my customers complained about a BizFlow database that was “running slowly”. BizFlow uses SQL Server to store data used in business processes – in this implementation there is a main BizFlow database,…