A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Vlad Drumea explains how powerful a few specific roles are:
Privilege escalation is a method in which an attacker gains unauthorized privileged access into a system.
This is done by exploiting misconfigurations, design flaws or unpatched vulnerabilities.The most straightforward example in SQL Server land being someone “promoting themselves” from members of the public fixed server role, to members of the sysadmin role.
Read on for these three roles and what you can do with them.
Leave a CommentThe Full-Text Engine manages full-text indexes. The engine splits your text columns into individual terms and builds an inverted index, mapping each term back to the rows in which it appears. Unlike a standard B-tree index, the structure lives outside the normal index internals and is maintained asynchronously via a background process called a crawl. Effectively, each word in your text string ends up indexed, rather than the string as a whole. This makes certain types of searches much more efficient (you need to use search terms like CONTAINS() to utilize full text indexes).
If you have to search strings like this then full-text indexes can be very effective. String searching isn’t great in SQL Server, but this is definitely a tool in your belt if you have a requirement that makes it useful.
Because of some changes to the way full-text indexing works in SQL Server 2025, there is a post-upgrade maintenance task you’ll have to perform.
Leave a CommentIn earlier posts in this series we established that every heap tuple lives inside a strict 8KB page. Everything else is built on top of that hard limit: MVCC, HOT updates, and indexes that point at
(page, line_pointer). And yet this still works:CREATE TABLE docs (id int PRIMARY KEY, body jsonb); INSERT INTO docs VALUES (1, (SELECT jsonb_agg(g) FROM generate_series(1, 100000) g));That
bodyvalue is somewhere north of half a megabyte. The heap page is still 8KB. Both statements are true at the same time, and the mechanism that makes them coexist is TOAST: The Oversized-Attribute Storage Technique.
Read on to see how TOAST works, when it kicks in, and some of the consequences of this solution.
Leave a CommentBernat Agullo Rosello compares two capabilities:
Ever since DAX UDFs came out as public preview in September 2025, many DAX developers started wondering how they will compare with calculation groups since both have the centralization of code as one of their main selling points. As pointed out in a recent article by SQLBI they are indeed very different beasts, even though they can be used to achieve very similar outputs.
In short, a calculation group is a model-level object whose items swap one DAX expression for another at evaluation time. Once an item is in the filter context, it applies to every measure being evaluated. A DAX UDF is a smaller object: a named, reusable expression with parameters, callable from any measure but invisible to report users.
Read on to see when calculation groups still make sense and when DAX UDFs are the better choice.
Leave a CommentGarry Bargsley puts it all together:
Over the past four weeks, you’ve built a real foundation. You know that single quotes are literal and double quotes expand variables. You know how to store and use data in variables – strings, integers, booleans, and hashtables. You know how to loop over a collection and do something useful to each item, including handling errors when a server doesn’t cooperate.
Now we put it all together. No new concepts this week, just everything you’ve learned working as a single, practical script that solves a real DBA problem. Think of it as your Jedi trials. The training is done. Time to use the Force.
Click through for the script. It’s fairly simple in terms of what it’s actually doing, but gives you a good idea of the types of things you can do.
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