Many undergraduates have misunderstood the name 'Students' in the t-test to imply that it was designed as a simple test suitable for students. In fact it was William Sealy Gosset, an Englishman publishing under the pseudonym Student, who developed the t-test and t distribution in 1908, as a way of making confident predictions from small sample sizes of normally-distributed variables. As Gosset's employer was Guinness, the brewer, Phil Factor takes a sober view of calculating it in SQL.  Read more...

SQL Server Agent jobs are made up of a series of one or more Job Steps. A job step is assigned to a specific job subsystem, which identifies the kind of work the job step is going to perform. Each job step runs in a separate security context, although each job also has an owner that determines who can modify the job.  Read more...

Time might be the most precious commodity that Steve Jones has in managing life.  Read more...

Three SQL Server MVPs (Jonathan Kehayias, Ted Krueger and Gail Shaw) provide fascinating insight into the most common SQL Server problems, why they occur, and how they can be diagnosed using tools such as Performance Monitor, Dynamic Management Views and server-side tracing. The focus is on practical solutions for removing root causes of these problems, rather than "papering over the cracks".  Read more...

If you’ve ever worked in a team that uses a single, shared database for development, you know how time-consuming and frustrating it is to provision copies of production databases for development work. In this webinar on October 17, you’ll see how SQL Clone cuts out the pain of provisioning development databases.  Read more...

Implementing SQL Server Failover Clustering in Azure virtual machines differs in several aspects from its on-premises implementations. These differences reflect some of the unique characteristics of the storage and network infrastructure services in the Microsoft cloud environment. In this article, Marcin Policht looks at the networking aspects of clustered deployments of SQL Server 2016 in Azure.  Read more...

An account of a recent encounter we had with a peculiar wait event which was initially misdiagnosed.  Read more...

If your development team needs to work on anonymised copies of the current production database, and if changes are being delivered rapidly as well, that could mean a lot of time and routine DevOps work copying databases. SQL Clone was designed for tasks like this. Grant Fritchey investigates whether you save time, effort and scripting over the more traditional approach, and at what point it makes sense to use it.  Read more...

More and more people are becoming citizen scientists, even in companies. Steve Jones thinks this is helpful, but we still need professionals.  Read more...

In this video, Steve Jones introduces the new Summary View that's now available in Redgate SQL Compare.  Read more...

Code Coverage is a metric that Steve Jones sees often misused.  Read more...

In this new article, we will learn how to create a cube extracting data from ADWH.  Read more...

Sudden performance issues in SQL Server can have many causes, ranging all the way from malfunctioning hardware, through to simple misconfiguration, or perhaps just end users doing things they shouldn’t. But one particularly common culprit is when deployments go wrong: I don’t know a single DBA who hasn’t been burned by a bad release.  Read more...

In a long career in IT, Phil Factor cannot recall a 'major incident', where the failure or breach was due to a single 'Achilles Heel', or even a single team of people. They are always due to a whole plethora of slack and ignorant practices.  Read more...

Erik Darling shows that if you take SQL Server's word when it asks for an index, things can go horribly awry.  Read more...

This tip will show eight ways to export the results of a query to a text file.  Read more...

This Friday Steve Jones wants to know what you think of testing code and why you don't do it.  Read more...

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is the integration and ETL (extract – transform – load) tool in the Microsoft Data Platform stack. SSIS is typically used in data warehousing scenarios, but can also be used in common data integration use cases or just to move data around. SSIS is used behind the scenes in the Maintenance Plans of SQL Server and in the Import/Export wizard.  Read more...

SQL Prompt does a lot more than just intellisense - in this article, Phil Factor provides a handy table showing all of the tool's functions and where to access them.  Read more...

Steve Jones talks about learning, teaching, and the need to not waste anyone's time.  Read more...