Question of the Day Section Added
Learn SQL Server the fun way through a bite-sized SQL Server question each day. Scores are kept so you'll know how you stack up against your peers in various categories.
2003-06-04
333 reads
Articles
Customers Don't Know What They Want
This article on the JoelonSoftware site discusses project management and customer expectations. It has a great discussion of why non-technical users place so much value on what they can see (the GUI) while developers place so much value in what can't be seen (yeah, the code!). It's actually more interesting than that, take a look!
2003-06-03
1,393 reads
DB2 A Worthy Competitor?
Recently Steve Jones spent a week working with IBM's DB2 database. Read about his thoughts and impressions of this SQL Server competitor.
2003-06-02
6,202 reads
Dependency Walker
Dependency Walker has been around for a while as part of Visual Studio. Have you tried it? Got the latest version? Andy does a very quick run through of what the product does, why you might need it, where to get the latest version, and why the new version is better than the old one (isn't it always?).
2003-05-30
7,932 reads
Find out about free Trade Publications
This is a great site that lists all the free trade publications in various industries. You have to meet the criteria of course, but you should definitely check out the offerings.
2003-05-29
1,031 reads
Importing And Analyzing Event Logs
Another new author! Gheorge shares some ideas about importing event logs and using OLAP to analyze the results. Not a bad idea at all. How many of use OLAP as often as we should? Read the article, see if it's something you want to try - and let Gheorge know what you think!
2003-05-28
13,026 reads
Red Gate Web Site Usability Survey
Red Gate asked if we would run a link to a short survey they are working on. Should only take a couple minutes and no personal information is required. They've been an advertiser with us since almost the beginning so we're glad to pass this along to our readers.
2003-05-27
715 reads
Trapping DTS errors with Transact-SQL
Joe has written some articles for us, he also some interesting comment on his site - this article looks at trapping errors such as timeouts or divide by zero.
2003-05-27
2,490 reads
Changing Rogue Database Collations
Collations hard to sort out (I know, bad joke)? Mike did what a good DBA gets paid to do, figure out an easy way to fix something and remove the chance of a user mistake at the same time. Good explanation and a couple scripts show how to handle column level collations.
2003-05-26
12,787 reads
Is Steve Jones Really Steve Jones?
Alien imposter? No, not that complicated. Andy saw an actor on TV that according to some looks JUST like our own Steve Jones. Steve is a good sport about such things and provided several photo's so you could judge for yourself. Of course, there is a little more to the story - read the article to see!
2003-05-26
4,055 reads
Blogs
Narrow Task Decomposition in AI Pipeline Agents
A nightly load into sales_fact fails. Ask an orchestrating agent to break down the...
Car Update: August 2026
By Steve Jones
It’s been some time since I provided a car update, so I decided to...
Microsoft Fabric OneLake Shortcuts: When to Use Them and When Not To
By James Serra
An architecture scenario Imagine separate Sales, Finance, Shared Data, and Executive Analytics workspaces. Sales...
Forums
Managing Incidents and Fighting Fires
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Managing Incidents and Fighting Fires
Backing Up a DMK
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Backing Up a DMK
The Quiet Part
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Quiet Part
Question of the Day
Backing Up a DMK
In SQL Server 2025, I have a database with a Database Masker Key (DMK). I want to back up this key and keep a copy offline. When do I have to open this key before running the backup?
See possible answers