Steve Jones enjoys his career in technology and hopes that you do as well.   Read more...

Have you ever heard this question? The database refresh has gone from 10-15 minutes to 1.5 hours. Nothing has changed on the application server and the consultant said ask the DBAs to check the database server. Where do you start to find the problem? Check out this tip to learn more.  Read more...

How to get an SSRS user's AD group membership in order to filter report content  Read more...

Join us for a free day of SQL Server Training on June 8, 2013. There's also a Friday Preconference Training Day with Jonathan Kehayias and Joseph Sack.  Read more...

With a huge increase in the number of online learning frameworks, Dave Convery wonders how comfortable people are with this new way of polishing their skills.  Read more...

Today Steve Jones looks at the way software affects the world and how we might be worried about how things might change in the future.  Read more...

Despite all the advances in software tools, there seem to be several enduring truths about software development. By understaning these 'laws', Ziv’s law, Humphrey’s Law and Conway’s Law for example, you can remove some of the mystery of the process. Al Noel discusses these and other laws that seem to apply generally to the art of programming.  Read more...

Learn how to load data in an XML file into a table in SQL Server.  Read more...

Tomorrow is the bicentennial SQL Saturday event. SQL Saturday #200 takes place in Philadelphia, and Steve Jones has some thoughts as he travels to the City of Brotherly Love.  Read more...

Any queries run against SQL Server or Oracle databases are recorded, along with how many times those queries were run and how long they took. That information is shown alongside your .NET code, so you can quickly see why the code you wrote resulted in those queries being executed. This can be particularly powerful if you’re using ORMs like Entity Framework to access data, which tend to be an impenetrable black box where performance issues can arise, but where it’s difficult to understand why.  Read more...

Your production SQL Server transactional replication just failed and the business impact is critical. How do you get replication restored in minutes?  Read more...

There isn't a lot of acceptance of Azure from DBAs. Steve Jones talks about some of the advantages of Azure and thinks that we should be working to ensure that our internal systems respond at the same speed as people can get from Azure.  Read more...

We're looking for scripts that you use in your daily job to find, fix, and solve issues in your environment.  Read more...

In this tip Aaron Bertrand describes some of the ways in which you can extend the DDL trigger functionality.  Read more...

The fifth installment of the sp_Blitz script being run on the SQLServerCentral database server.  Read more...

The Microsoft Connect system allows many of us to submit feedback, but is Microsoft doing anything with it? Join us and place your vote on some items and try to influence Microsoft.  Read more...

This custom metric adds Brent Ozar's popular SP_Blitz scripts to Red Gate SQL Monitor. It looks for configuration, security, health and performance problems, and reports back with a list of issues for you to look into. It’s great for quickly understanding the state of a server you've been asked to look after.  Read more...

Databases often need more than just the database objects to run. There may be certain server objects and components, and SQL Agent objects, that are required as well. For an automated deployment, these need to be identified and their build script placed in source control. They then need to be deployed via the pre, or post deployment script. Phil spells out how and why.  Read more...

Data and software will impact our lives more and more in the future. Steve Jones talks about some of the potential ways in which both of these have changed the world.  Read more...

This post tells you how to change the QUOTED_IDENTIFIER and ANSI_NULLS settings of a database objects using Powershell.  Read more...