How to Suck at Database Administration
Tara Kizer outlines 15 telltale signs that you aren't a very good senior DBA.
2018-02-26
5,733 reads
Additional Articles
"But It Worked in Development!" - 3 Hard SQL Server Performance Problems
You’ve been performance tuning queries and indexes for a few years, but lately, you’ve been running into problems you can’t explain. Could it be RESOURCE_SEMAPHORE, THREADPOOL, or lock escalation? These problems only pop up under heavy load or concurrency, so they’re very hard to detect in a development environment.
2018-02-23
7,201 reads
Degree of Duplication
Technology is constantly moving forward, but it is also helpful to understand how we arrived where we are today. Joe Celko reminisces about the history of database design and how it relates to the concept of ‘Degree of Duplication’ in this article.
2018-02-22
3,419 reads
SQL Server Reporting Services 2017 Tutorial
SQL Server Reporting Services has been the go to reporting solution for SQL Server for almost a decade now. In many organizations, the ease of development, web front end and security make SSRS the tool of choice.
2018-02-21
4,545 reads
How to Move a TDE Encryption Key to Another SQL Server Instance
If you have a database backup of a Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) enabled database, the database backup will contain encrypted data. Because the database backup contains encrypted data you can’t just restore it to any instance. You can only restore the database backup to an instance that contains the same certificate used to originally encrypt the database.
2018-02-20
2,970 reads
Questions about Data Governance that You Were Too Shy to Ask
A company’s data is one of its most valuable and important resources. Managing and protecting that data are big responsibilities, and a data governance processes must be put into place to avoid misuse and to meet regulations. In this article, William Brewer answers questions you may have about data governance but were too shy to ask.
2018-02-19
4,962 reads
When Does Index Size Change Index Choice?
Erik purposely fragments indexes trying to slow down queries.
2018-02-15
3,508 reads
SQL Server Machine Learning Services – Part 4: Finding Data Anomalies with Python
Python is widely used to analyze data. One such use is to find anomalies or outliers. In this article, Robert Sheldon demonstrates how to create a support vector machine (SVM) to score test data so that outliers can be viewed on a scatter plot.
2018-02-14
3,434 reads
Updating an expired SQL Server TDE certificate
Simon Liew explains how to generate a new TDE certificate to replace the previous, and also looks at the steps needed if the database is in an Availability Group.
2018-02-13
2,865 reads
How to Implement Dynamic Data Masking in Azure SQL Database and SQL Server
Anoop Kumar shows you the SQL Commands (T-SQL) to secure PII/PHI data using the SQL Server Dynamic Data Masking (DDM) feature and explores DDM's built in functions to mask all critical data elements. DDM restricts unauthorized users from accessing critical data with no changes in the application.
2018-02-12
2,929 reads
Blogs
Programmatic Tool Calling with the Claude SDK
Programmatic Tool Calling with the Claude SDK Every morning somebody on the team runs the...
A New Word: Mauerbauertraurigkeit
By Steve Jones
mauerbauertraurigkeit – n. inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends whose company...
Methodology for dealing with bad data in production
By Brian Kelley
Pinal Dave wrote up his methodology for what to do when you discover bad...
Forums
Why SQL Server Database Attach fails and how to repair it
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Why SQL Server Database Attach...
Fixing P1 Queries
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Question of the Day
BIT_COUNT() IV
In SQL Server 2025, I run this code:
select bit_count('A')
What is returned? See possible answers