Internal and external fragmentation – Causes, cures, and when not to care  Read more...

Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) are a significant and valuable addition to the DBA's troubleshooting armory, laying bare previously unavailable information regarding the under-the-covers activity of your database sessions and transactions.  Read more...

For loading text, CSV or XML files into SQL Server, the Log Parser utility, with its amazing SQL engine, is likely to be the obvious choice. Although initially developed purely for converting IIS logs, the Log Parser can turn its hand to a range of formats including even event logs or the Windows registry.   Read more...

Prevent overlapping of time events with an indexed view.  Read more...

This Friday Steve Jones has a poll about developers. Help compile a good list of common mistakes made in SQL Server.  Read more...

The Red Gate SSMS Ecosystem is a framework that makes it easy to develop, share and manage SSMS add-ins. We aim to help add-in developers build everything from homegrown solutions and community-driven projects to commercial solutions provided by partner companies. We hope that DBAs and database developers will benefit from better integrated tools.  Read more...

This article discusses Microsoft Power BI, different tools under the Microsoft Power BI umbrella and when each of them can be used.  Read more...

Software maintenance is often required when purchasing software packages. But do the vendors deliver value for this charge? Steve Jones has a few thoughts on the subject.  Read more...

If you are planning on taking the Microsoft Certification Exam for 70-462, this guide provides the step-by-step instructions to completely setup your Hyper-V lab environment used in the official training kit.  Read more...

Steve Jones has some concerns over new options in SQL Server 2014 that might lead some customers to experiment in a way that causes them unexpected pain.  Read more...

SQL Server provides the UNION, EXCEPT, and INTERSECT set operations. How do they work and how can they be used in SQL Server? Can you provide any examples? Check out this tip to learn more.  Read more...

Learn how to use SQLCLR to get file system information instead of using xp_cmdshell on your SQL Servers.  Read more...

Steve Jones thinks there is a list of core skills that any database developer or DBA needs. This week he asks you for a list of those things you think should be included.  Read more...

You may come across or even inherit a system where many of the users have different default schemas. Usually, this is easy to remedy - you go into Management Studio, right-click the user, and change the default schema through the UI. Or you write an ALTER USER command manually. But what if you have hundreds of users, across all of your user databases, that should all have the same default schema?  Read more...

SQL Server Big Data. Is the end Near for ETL as we know is? Will RDBMs be obsolete? What is NoSQL? What is Hadoop? Big Data-the whole story.  Read more...

SQL Saturday is a free day of SQL Server training and networking coming to Washington DC on December 7. Paid pre-con sessions for this SQL Saturday are available.  Read more...

Today Steve Jones talks about some of the problems in SQL Server. Should we be documenting the situations in which features don't work well?  Read more...

In this series on implementing data services in Azure, Marcin Policht turns his attention to the remediation of incompatibilities resulting from of limitations inherent to Platform as a Service (PaaS) based deployments, which will need to be addressed as part of the migration process.  Read more...

Steve Jones knows that good development practices require lots of skill and practice, but the basis for stability with your code is version control. He talks about some reasons why you might want to implement it.  Read more...

The Publisher is the database where all replicated data originates. Each Publisher can have multiple publications defined within it. Each publication contains a set of articles that all need to reside in a single database. Each article corresponds to all or part of a single database object. A single database object can map to an article in more than one publication.  Read more...