Normalizing Performance

Determining the best performance value you can get for your effort is not as straightforward as you might think.

Setting Expectations–T-SQL Testing

I don’t know who started this pattern, as I’ve seen it in a few places. It could have been Sebastian...

The Geek Costume

This Friday Steve Jones has another fun poll. A question on the geek costume that might excite you the most.

Friday Shirts

Quick Schema Auditing

I was working on a demo recently and needed to show that a little monitoring can help you catch schema...

Stuck in a Rut

What do people do when their job doesn't require a lot of technical skills? Steve Jones has a few thoughts.

Triple Digits

Salaries for data professionals have risen quite a bit, according to the latest salary survey. That's good for those of us working with SQL Server.

FIRST_VALUE

Template parameters

When is 8000 too small?

Over the years the page size in SQL Server has changed, growing larger to fit larger data sets. However not all functions have been modified to work with larger page sizes. Or even exceed them. Steve Jones wonders if it's time to increase the page size.