Hey folks, long time no write! Today I want to bring a tip that I use every week but I found that most SSMS users are unaware it exists. I can understand why! At the moment this isn’t the most obvious and user-friendly option. However, it can and hopefully it will improve in the future. “But…What is it?” I’m talking about using the Query Store GUI to search for some portion of text used in a T-SQL query and, with that, find a query that you want to analyze within it.

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Who doesn’t like a good red and verbose exception? At PowerShell community we often call it a “sea of red” which we found as something that can be intimidating. The bigger the error message the more problematic it is? :-) We don’t think so! That’s why we, within dbatools project, try to keep the output of the exceptions more user friendly and try to give the direct error message to you.

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Some datatypes can be shown in so many different forms (think measurament units, dates with short/long forms, or regional settings) that can be difficult to have a standard. What should we show? Sizes should be always in bytes? It will be easier for you to interpret 1610612736 bytes or 1.50 GB? That’s why we have created some rich datatypes like, DbaTime, DbaDate, DbaDatetime, DbaTimeSpan, PrettyTimeSpan or DbaSize to make it easier to read and be more consistent acrross multiple commands.

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Context I had a request to help with a database from a third-party vendor which uses a lot of FullText-Search (FTS) catalogs. I have to say that I just have played a handful of times with FTS, mostly in a didactic way, and not so much in the perspective of a production system and its maintenance. Long story short, this client had a couple of problems in the past with FTS.

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This article was initially posted on SQLServerCentral @ 2020-08-18. It was interesting some comments I read about it, mainly why people still use WITH ENCRYPTION when it’s simple to overcome this when we have the right permissions. SQL Server offers an option to encrypt the code of your modules when using the WITH ENCRYPTION syntax. This allows to hide/obfuscate the modules’ code and thus keep away from prying eyes. It’s often used to protect business rules since it allows you to protect some intellectual property.

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