Additional Articles

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Technical Article

Strategy, Tactics, and Business Intelligence

There is a lot of talk these days about “business intelligence” (BI for short). Pick up any magazine aimed at business or technology professionals, and you’re sure to read about things like data warehouses, dashboards, cubes, ETL, SCD, and a seemingly endless list of other specialized terms and acronyms. One might be left wondering, is this something to which I should be paying attention?

2006-06-06

2,524 reads

External Article

SQL Server Performance Testing

This (new) design bothered me. It violated one of the fundamentals that I'd learned and read about for years; namely keeping the primary key small and narrow. It also looked like it would be difficult to maintain. Finally, after arguing back and forth about the merits and drawbacks of each of the designs, we decided that testing them was the only way to be sure

2006-06-02

4,359 reads

External Article

SQL Server 2005 Integration Services - Transaction Support - Part 25

The latest article in our series discusses improvements in the transactional support implemented in SQL Server 2005 Integration Services. The more granular scope of transactions, which now can be assigned to arbitrarily designated Control Flow tasks and containers, makes it is possible to limit their impact or execute several of them in parallel. However, even with this improved functionality, you need to keep the blocking issues they might potentially introduce in mind.

2006-06-01

2,138 reads

External Article

Talking Technical

Should IT managers understand technical issues, or is a full appreciation of the technology somehow unworthy and unnecessary for senior staff? In such a rapidly changing industry where fortunes are made and lost by attempting to exploit gaps in the market too thin to see with the naked eye, the answer would seem obvious. However, I have repeatedly come across amazing gaps in the technical knowledge of managers.

2006-05-31

2,425 reads

Technical Article

Load 1TB in less than 1 hour

This project was done using SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition (with SP1 beta) using the BULK INSERT command with 60 parallel input files, each of approximately 16.67 GB. The best time I got was 50 minutes. Hewlett Packard was kind enough to loan me some time one night on the machine they use to do the TPC-H tests. It is an Itanium2 Superdome with 64 1.6GHZ 9M (Madison) CPUs. For the insert tests the system was equipped with 256GB of RAM. The HP SAN configuration is rated at 14GB per second throughput.

2006-05-30

2,290 reads

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Blogs

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Forums

The day-to-day pressures of a DBA team, and how we can work smarter with automation and AI

By Terry Jago

Comments posted to this topic are about the item The day-to-day pressures of a...

The Problem Isn't Always Your Query or Schema... Sometimes It's Hidden Assumptions

By dbruton95

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Identity Defaults

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Identity Defaults

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Question of the Day

Identity Defaults

What happens when I run this code? 

CREATE TABLE dbo.IdentityTest
(
     id int IDENTITY(10) PRIMARY KEY,
     somevalue VARCHAR(20)
)
GO

See possible answers