If you look at the challenges facing those charged with building platforms to power data-driven companies, we’ve made a lot of progress but vexing questions remain. One of the most important is ...

Therefore it is probably better to say that the system catalog is semi-active, instead of completely active. Nevertheless, for the most part, the system catalog operates as an active data dictionary, ...

PolyBase, a data virtualization feature for SQL Server, allows users to seamlessly query data from various external sources directly using T-SQL (Transact-SQL) without the need for separate client ...

If you Google the term data dictionary, you will get 100 or more results of definitions that generally mean the same thing. A "data dictionary" is data about data. It is what defines the items in ...

How will SQL Database Edge connect back to Azure/on-premises? Azure SQL Database Edge has a streaming engine which is built on top of Azure Stream Analytics.

A new SQL Server 2025 feature lets organizations run vector-based semantic searches on their own data, connecting to local or cloud-hosted AI models without relying on massive general-purpose LLMs.

How to Encrypt or Decrypt Data in Access Tables. If your business uses Microsoft's Access database software to manage sensitive data, you'll want to encrypt your database and its tables to prevent ...

Dino Esposito explains JSON-to-rowset native support in SQL Server 2016 and provides a realistic perspective of data query when you have JSON data stored in the database.

SQL has dominated data querying for decades. Newer query languages offer more elegance, simplicity, and flexibility for modern use cases.

How to Perform Multiple Queries on an Excel Spreadsheet. Using the External Data Connection feature in Excel, you can acquire information from external sources, such as Access and SQL Server. The ...