Articles

Technical Article

A True SQL OS

SQL Server is so large and complex that it's like an operating system. In fact, there the core engine is often referred to as the "SQL OS" by Microsoft developers. Steve Jones would like to see SQL Server as it's own OS at some point.

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2009-08-26

483 reads

Technical Article

A True SQL OS

SQL Server is so large and complex that it's like an operating system. In fact, there the core engine is often referred to as the "SQL OS" by Microsoft developers. Steve Jones would like to see SQL Server as it's own OS at some point.

You rated this post out of 5. Change rating

2009-08-26

530 reads

Technical Article

Kimball University: Five Alternatives for Better Employee Dimension Modeling

The employee dimension presents one of the trickier challenges in data warehouse modeling. These five approaches ease the complication of designing and maintaining a 'Reports To' hierarchy for ever-changing reporting relationships and organizational structures.

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2009-08-26

3,651 reads

Technical Article

The Ghost in the Machine

Now that hierarchical data structures are popular again because of XML, their full hierarchical processing is still being limited to flat two dimensional linear path processing by relational processing. This will change when database professionals realize that ANSI SQL relational processing can now support full multipath nonlinear hierarchical processing.

2009-08-25

3,326 reads

External Article

Validate SQL Server Backups Exist with Policy Based Management

I recently submitted a tip regarding the existence of your backup files using the undocumented system stored procedure xp_fileexist. But how would you go about executing that script against all your SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 instances? I took that script and decided to go one step further using Policy Based Management to create a custom policy that you can then run against all your SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 instances.

2009-08-25

2,712 reads

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SQL Server 2025 Backup Compression Algorithm

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The Large Encoded Value

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Large Encoded Value

The Side Job

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Side Job

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Question of the Day

The Large Encoded Value

I want to use the new BASE64_ENCODE() function in SQL Server 2025, but return a string that isn't large type. What is the longest varbinary string I can pass in and still get a varchar(8000) returned?

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