(Rob Farley) I wrote a post recently about DISTINCT and GROUP BY. It was a comparison that showed that GROUP BY is generally a better option than DISTINCT. It’s on a different site, but be sure to come back to sqlperformance.com right after..

(Thomas LaRock) We’ve all been there, sitting in our cubicle, trying to migrate data from one server to another. Most of the time everything works as expected. But sometimes data migrations don’t work at all.

(Pinal Dave) One of my clients was trying to recover from a disaster and wanted to attach the MDF and LDF files. While trying to do that, they encountered an error. In this blog we would learn about how to fix the error – User ‘guest’ does not have permission to run DBCC checkprimaryfile while attac

(Michael J. Swart) I had the privilege of listening to Itzik Ben Gan talk about “distinctness” in a talk he gave at PASS Summit.

(Jose M Jurado) I worked on a new situation, when we need to connect to a Azure SQL Database using SQL Alias in the same way that we have SQL Server on-premise. Unfortunately, there is not supported, but we are going to test and make it successfully.

(Koen Verbeeck) I have a PivotTable in Excel where I show users data from an Analysis Services Tabular 2017 model. The PivotTable shows aggregated data and users were wondering how the data was calculated. I’m looking for behavior like a drillthrough report in Reporting Services. Is this possible?

(PInal Dave) In SQL Server one error message can be caused due to many reasons. One of such error message is 3271 which is caused during failure of backup to URL command. Here are two earlier blogs about same error message 3271. (404) Not Found.

(Mark Wilkinson) Direct seeding is a new feature available for Availability Groups in SQL Server 2016 and later. Direct seeding allows you to bypass the usual backup/restore process associated with setting up Availability Groups and instead, add databases to an Availability Group with a single comma

(Thomas LaRock) The new version of SQL Server Management Studio (v17.5) brings with it a new feature: SQL Data Discovery and Classification. You might recall that in SSMS 17.4 the Vulnerability Assessment feature was added.

(Jose M Jurado) Today, I worked on a scenario where our customer needs to export around 100 databases from SQL Server to Azure SQL Database. After checking the compatibility of the database using Microsoft Data Migration Assistant we found that the migration process we are not able to export at the