Data Documents and Common Sense
What can be so difficult in creating a sensible standard for Structured Data Documents? To understand why they tend to get improved into unusable complexity, I’ll need to explain a bit of background.
2025-01-06
Articles
Leveraging the “STUFF” Function for Enhanced Data Representation and String Manipulation
Learn the basics of the T-SQL STUFF command.
2025-01-03
3,553 reads
Improved RCSI Ghost Cleanup in SQL Server 2022
An example of poor update performance under RCSI as compared with locking read committed. Details of an improvement in SQL Server 2022 that can help avoid the worst effects.
2025-01-03
DAX For SQL Folks: Part I- Intro to DAX, Power BI and Data Viz
In this first article, get an introduction to DAX, it's uses, and the basics of a DAX query as compared to a T-SQL query.
2025-01-01 (first published: 2020-03-26)
25,487 reads
The Data Center that Exploded
A while back, in a Simple-Talk editorial meeting, someone bet Phil Factor that he couldn't come up with a Halloween story. To our surprise he said he could, as long as he didn't have to keep to the strict literal truth. In the end, he came up with a story about a story, and it is true that he first told the story in a data Centre at Halloween!
2025-01-01 (first published: 2014-10-31)
10,375 reads
GUID in SQL Server
This tip's objective is to present and describe several T-SQL examples for creating, using, and analyzing GUIDs and assessing their uniqueness.
2024-12-30
How to Repair Corrupt MySQL Tables
In the modern world, the companies are not solely dependent on a specific database server platform. There are many database platforms available that are adequate to handle moderate workload and client requirements of high availability and disaster recovery. MySQL is one of those database platforms which provides a lot of features and high performance. Just […]
2024-12-27
1,471 reads
SQL Server Forced Plans Overwite the Query Hash
A 16-year old SQL Server bug that means 'forced plans' have the query plan hash in place of the expected query hash. Includes an explanation and discussion of the term 'morally equivalent plan'.
2024-12-27
Convert Excel Workbooks to CSV with Microsoft Fabric
For my new mission, I set out to convert a list of files from Excel to comma-separated values (CSV). We upload the original Excel files to a Data Lake in Fabric. We then need to convert a specific worksheet and move the CSV files to a different folder in Data Lake.
2024-12-25
A gentle introduction to dbt
Over the past years, the tool dbt – short for data build tool – has become quite popular in the data engineering world for handling such an ELT process. dbt takes on the role of the “T”, meaning it’s responsible for transforming the data in a certain data store.
2024-12-23
Blogs
SQL Server Security Hardening Guide Using the DoD STIG Checklist
Security on your SQL Server is important. That doesn’t need any explaining. But where...
EightKB 2026: Registration is Open!
It’s that time of year again! EightKB is back on August 20th at 13:00...
TRY_PARSE Limitations: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
I got a notification from a question I’d posted at SQL Server Central: Getting...
Forums
Are You Working More Hours?
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Stairway to Reliable Database Deployments Level 6 – Managing Changesets Over Time
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A Limited Startup
Comments posted to this topic are about the item A Limited Startup
Question of the Day
A Limited Startup
I add this parameter to SQL Server 2025 in the Configuration Manager:
-mDynamicsWhat does this do? See possible answers