Gregory Larsen

The first thing I do in the morning at work is to scan my email looking for nightly failed SQL Agent jobs.  Not only does my inbox have all the SQL Agent Job failures, but it also has lots of successful job notifications and alert email messages.  Finding the nightly job failures is just one […]

During the development cycle, indexes will be placed on SQL Server tables to speed up performance when searching for records. Lots of thought probably has gone into creating just the right mix of indexes based on how developers think customers will use the system. But how do you tell if all the indexes are being […]

There are times when you might what to execute a stored procedure where you want the output of the stored procedure to go into a table, instead of having the output display across the screen. Putting the output in a table provides you multiple options for parsing and using the output with other TSQL commands. […]

There are times when you might want to read backup / restore history information for a SQL Server database.  This information is stored in the backup / restore metadata tables within the msdb database. The backup information is useful for identifying when backups ran (start and finish date/time), the location where the backup was written, […]

Sometimes the SQL Server ERRORLOG file can become very large.  This happens typically when you have turned on auditing for successful and failed logins.  Additionally if you don’t restart SQL Server very often, or don’t recycle the ERRORLOG these files can become quite large; so large that it becomes difficult to browse the file looking […]

Every time you backup or restore a database SQL Server keeps history information about the backup or restore operation.  The backup and restore information is captured and stored in the msdb database.  This backup and restore information if left unchecked can take up more and more space over time.  To minimize msdb storage space you […]

There are times when you want some users to see part of a column value but not the whole thing, but you want other users to see the complete column value without any masking.  For example you may want to only allow your call center staff to only see the last 4 digits for a […]

As you start creating temporal tables to track history information you might find it necessary to join the history records with the current records into a single set of records.  With the introduction of temporal table support in SQL Server 2016 Microsoft also added some additional functionality that makes it easy for you to join […]

In my last article (https://www.databasejournal.com/ms-sql/altering-an-existing-table-to-support-temporal-data/) I showed you how to modify an existing table to take advantage of the new temporal data feature in SQL Server 2016. By having a temporal data table (history table) I was able to show the changes that have taken place after temporal data support for an existing table was […]

If you are looking for a way to track the history of all the data changes to a table then SQL Server 2016 has you covered with the new temporal table support. With Temporal tables SQL Server is able to store all the older data records into in a history table while keeping the current […]

In my last two articles (Allow Access to Only a Subset of Rows Using Row Level Security, and Blocking Updates at the Row Level) I discussed implementing Row Level Security using SQL Server 2016.  Row Level security is all about restricting database users from being able to view, or update rows based on who they […]

In my last article I talked about restricting read access using the new SQL Server 2016 filter predicate feature of a security policy.  With the new security policy feature in SQL Server 2016 you can also restrict write operations at the row level.  To restrict write access you need to define a block predicate.  In […]