First of all, a sincere thanks to everybody that took the time to contribute posts to this month’s T-SQL Tuesday (#87) – Fixing Old Problems with Shiny New Toys. I realize the time it takes to put a post together, so thanks for participating and helping the community.

Secondly, I couldn’t decide whether or not to call this the “rollup” post or the “roundup” post, but since I’m in Texas this week for work, “roundup” won the day. If you think I should have gone “rollup”, by all means email Adam Machanic (amachanic at gmail dot com) after taking a look at the T-SQL Tuesday hosting rules, agree to host a month, and call your summary post whatever your heart desires!

On a personal note, one of my goals for 2017 was to be more disciplined about blogging and this has gotten that initiative off to a solid start. I highly recommend hosting/participating in T-SQL Tuesday and hope you’ll return here to read my regular posts as the months and years go on.

Finally, as a first time host, I was obviously hoping that this topic would garner some responses, but you never know until you hit that post button whether you’ve selected something of interest to the community or not. Thankfully, this month’s topic picked up views from over 20 countries and over 20 blog responses. The list (with a brief post-by-post commentary from me) is below. Happy reading and thanks again for reading/writing/participating!

This Month’s Responses

Row Level Security – Steve Jones provides an intriguing solution using very new toys (SQL Server 2016 and/or Azure SQL Database) to solve a very old problem (users seeing data they shouldn’t).

Fixing Old Security Problems with Shiny New Toys – Duncan Greaves reviews four new or new-ish security features that you need to understand (and should probably be using).

SQL Server 2016’s JSON Functionality – Bert Wagner details JSON support in SQL Server (from community support to official support) and some use cases for it as well.

Calculated Tables and Role-Playing Dimensions – I was really pleased to get a few responses on SQL Server topics outside of the database engine. My colleague Ginger Grant provides a blog that’s guaranteed to save a few SSAS users some hassle.

Data Theft and Backup Encryption – Mark Southall provides a fascinating object lesson on how useful it can be to encrypt your backups. This one should give all of us something to think about.

Server Level Database Permissions – Kenneth Fisher gives us a great reminder that server level database permissions exist and that they make our lives easier.

Solving the Net Changes Problem with Temporal Tables – Adam Machanic (thanks again for letting me host!) gives us a detailed look at how we can use temporal tables (a shiny new toy) to potentially replace the functionality of change tracking (a less shiny, older toy).

String Splitting – Aaron Bertrand gives us a look at string splitting in SQL Server 2016 along with a bonus look at the STRING_AGG() we’ll see in SQL Server vNext.

Granting Read Permissions on Everything! – Shane O’Neill gives us an interesting look at easily granting read permissions to users.

STRING_SPLIT – My colleague Steve Hughes gives us another look at one of SQL Server 2016’s hidden gems.

New Way to See Wait Stats for a Single Query – Robert L Davis gives us a great look at how to zero in on the wait stats (including the worst offenders) for a single query.

Beware Shiny New Toys – Wayne Sheffield turns my topic on its head and warns us about the danger of blindly trusting shiny new toys.

Better Index Maintenance in Maintenance Plans – SQL Cyclist shows us the improvements in index maintenance tasks within maintenance plans.

Where Did My Backup Compression Go? – Garry Bargsley gives us a great look at backup compression on TDE databases in SQL Server 2016.

Angle Brackets vs. Curly Braces – Riley Major reminds us that not everybody has these shiny new toys but that there may be some different ways, in older versions, to approximate the way some shiny new toys (like JSON support) behave.

Using AT TIME ZONE to Fix a Report – Rob Farley gives us a great new solution to solve those brain-bending timezone issues for reports and other query-driven datasets.

Providing Data to Customers More Quickly – Jens Vestergaard gives us an interesting look at how SQL Server 2016 SP1’s performance improvements (and an Azure VM) provided the horsepower to generate data that had been previously requested but whose generation used to take far too long before now.

Power BI in SSRS – James Anderson gives us a look at a cool new innovation in the BI realm of the SQL Server world: Power BI in SSRS 2016.

Musings on SESSION_CONTEXT() – Ewald Cress takes a deep dive into SESSION_CONTEXT(). Great, in-depth thoughts here.

Temporal Tables – My colleague Bob Rubocki gives us a blog version of his well-received temporal tables webinar. This is a good, easy-to-understand walk through this shiny new toy.

Performance Tuning Out of the Box (tempdb) – Björn Peters gives us a good look at the tempdb configuration options Microsoft included in SQL Server 2016 setup. Although I took 3+ years of German, I had to break out the English translator for his one, but it was awesome to get responses in multiple languages!

Two New Useful DMV Columns – Rodney Landrum points us to a very convenient way to check whether or not two important configuration options are set without having to fire up Microsoft Management Console.