A free day of SQL Server training in upstate New York.  Read more...

There are many people trying to make the world better for others. Bono is one of them, with the elimination of hunger as his goal. He calls himself a "factivist" trying to use data to inspire others to join him.  Read more...

While backup to the Cloud may be useful in terms of optimizing storage across the enterprise, for DBAs it remains essential that they retain fast, easy, access to the backup files. Azure Explorer is a free tool that might help.  Read more...

Marcin Policht explores some of PowerShell's SSIS-specific automation capabilities by demonstrating the process of configuring an already deployed package in order to carry out a parameterized package execution.  Read more...

Check and foreign key constraint do not degrade performance but actually improve it.  Read more...

Starting with SQL Server 2005, developers have had recursion available as a T-SQL language feature. This article describes recursion and its SQL Server implementations, complete with examples. It also includes SQL Server functions and a stored procedure that unpacks, or parses, an integer into its multiple-of-two components.  Read more...

SQL Relay is an annual community-run series of SQL Server training events across the UK. SQL Relay will run 8, 1-day conferences over the course of 2 weeks starting June 17th. Speakers from Microsoft, global IT companies, and a host of MVPs, are covering topics on DBA, business intelligence, and development.  Read more...

Does vacation cause extra stress at your job before or after you leave? Steve Jones asks a poll question this Friday to see how you feel. This editorial was originally published on June 12, 2008. It is being re-run as Steve is traveling.  Read more...

Ever need to automatically stop a long running job? Ever need to find which named Schedule is the currently running version of your job? There's simple code that'll let you find out.  Read more...

What should you do if your first, most intuitive solution to a problem ends up scanning the data more than is necessary, resulting in poor performance? Have you missed a new SQL Server feature that can remove inefficiency from your technique? Alternatively, do you need a little help, and some lateral thinking, to open the path to a different approach? Sometimes, the answer is "both".  Read more...

Travel can be stressful and complicated. As much as computer systems have made things easier, when they fail, your trip can turn awful in a hurry.  Read more...

Our major goal in terms of log maintenance for all databases under our care is to optimize for write performance, in order to support all activities that require SQL Server to write to the log, including data modifications, data loads, index rebuilds, and so on. However, it's also important to keep an eye on possible log fragmentation, which, as described previously, can affect the performance of processes that need to read the log, such as log backups and the crash recovery process.  Read more...

SQL Monitor comes with plenty of metrics, but there are always going to be things that you want to measure that can't be done 'out of the box'. Taking database mirroring as an example, Grant shows that custom metrics can be used to monitor and alert whatever aspect of SQL Server or database that you need.  Read more...

Can you own data itself or patent it? There's a Supreme Court case dealing with this right now. Steve Jones notes that the outcome could affect our jobs as we deal with more and more data and laws to control data are enacted.  Read more...

There are any number of ways to help your career move forward. Steve Jones talks about one way you might not have thought about today.  Read more...

This article describes a technique of using FULL JOINs to compare two datasets within a numerical tolerance.  Read more...

A comprehensive list of trace flags for SQL Server that you can use to configure your server instance.  Read more...

You may already have a great backup and recovery plan. However, if something were to happen to your databases and you needed to restore from your backups, you’d want to be in control, with the ability to access a copy of those backups quickly, restoring them with minimal downtime and minimal fuss. In this session Grant Fritchey, SQL Server MVP, will discuss the key reasons why you need to have offsite backups, and the advantages of hosted storage. He’ll address some of the fears surrounding cloud backups, and show how offsite backup is made quick and easy with the new ‘backup to hosted storage’ features in SQL Backup Pro 7.3.   Read more...

Based on a linked server setup, you can check your SQL Server backups on multiple instances.  Read more...

When a database starts showing signs of an illness, it's up to the DBA to get to the root of the problem, fast. Kat Hicks takes a look at the most common causes of database troubles, free tools that can help, and the misconceptions that get in the way.  Read more...