If you’re involved in the database world it’s hard to have missed the rise of the “no-sql” database products, designed to – depending on your view or the product I suppose – make databases simpler, break out of the transaction database paradigm, scale out across hundreds of machines, make it easy to change the db design (or not require one). I think some of the problems no-sql tries to solve are real, others reflect a lack of awareness/training/tools on how and why relational databases could not just solve the problem, but solve it better.  Read more...

PBM raises errors for policy violations. We can create alerts on those errors to be notified of policy violations. In order to setup alerts on these errors there are three prerequisites. Note that violations for the “On Demand” evaluation mode do not raise errors. A policy must be set to  Read more...

Extended events have been a bit of a personal “Elephant in the room” for me. I know they are there and I should really get on a start using them but never *quite* have a compelling enough reason.   Read more...

My first day in Seattle has ended. My flight arrived around 12:30 and I was in good company with John Lang and Julie Smith on the same flight. We rode the light rail...  Read more...

For Day 7 of this series, I will talk about the incredibly useful CPU-Z utility, which is available for free...  Read more...

This is the second part of a leadership series I started with On Leadership - Lead from the Front. To recap...  Read more...

How do you check if you are a sysadmin? It’s fairly easy to do in Management Studio. You can go...  Read more...

As I recently discussed, I often hear from database professionals who are not allowed to access their database servers directly....  Read more...

Everyone knows that in SQL 2000, yes 2000, Microsoft jumped aboard the bandwagon of other platforms, and gave the developers...  Read more...

Getting at data within a .NET application can be straightforward using built in controls or much more complex through connections,...  Read more...

Do you use NULLIF?  For me, this command has been seldom used.  Because of that, I have been dabbling with...  Read more...

Sometimes when we’re trying to track down a problem and looking through SQL’s Logs we have to dig...  Read more...

Your customers expectations are their primary measure of your success. How well are you managing them? You’re reading The DBAs Guide...  Read more...

I had an interview earlier this week. An interview for a SQL developer position. It went fine. But. Question number X...  Read more...

Things Go South Recently I was troubleshooting a piece of software that archives data out of a very active import table....  Read more...

SQL’s auto-updating statistics go a fair way to making SQL Server a self-tuning database engine and in many cases they...  Read more...

From time to time I see a question asking how to determine the last time a SQL Server was either...  Read more...

To mark my 30th Birthday today, as promised here’s a SQL Server Crossword for you to enjoy. You can find the previous...  Read more...

G’day, When I design a table in SQL SERVER, I like to have a reasonable understanding of how the table will...  Read more...

It’s reasonably well known that you can get different execution plans if you change the ANSI connection settings. But the...  Read more...