Free download to all Simple Talk users. XML has been part of the SQL Standard since 2003, and is essential for any DBA because so many of the dynamic management views return XML data. Now that the industry is more used to data defined by document markup, it is becoming more important than ever for Database Developers and DBAs to understand the technology and to know where it makes sense to use XML.
2017-06-02
6,152 reads
Although the techniques of Database Lifecycle Management can reduce the timescales for the delivery of new functionality to business systems, what if the database 'layer' consists of several large interdependent databases and data flows with replication and audit? Does DLM scale to this level of complexity? Margaret Cruise O'Brien starts a series of articles that describes the practicalities of improving DLM within an existing framework and team supporting a multi-database multi-server system, by describing some of the database management problems and solutions in an enterprise-scale database.
2017-06-02
2,744 reads
Derik Hammer sets out to disprove another pervasive performance myth : TRUNCATE is faster than DELETE because it isn't logged and can't be rolled back.
2017-06-01
4,663 reads
How do you quantify the value of DevOps? The answer might depend on what value actually means for your organization, which stakeholder you’re talking to, and what type of...
2017-06-01
2,805 reads
Have you ever checked the size of the SQL Server tempdb after restarting SQL Server to find that it's reset? Simon Liew explains this behaviour.
2017-05-31
3,326 reads
Bhavesh Patel shows how to validate specific use-cases for integer and decimal values in SQL Server.
2017-05-31
3,649 reads
A number of security-related features are built into Azure SQL Database, including Transparent Data Encryption, Row-Level Security, and Azure SQL Database Auditing. Their availability reflects the consistent effort by Microsoft to provide functional parity between Azure SQL Database and SQL Server instances running in Azure virtual machines as well as in your on-premises environment. Another example of this trend is support for Dynamic Data Masking, covered in this article.
2017-05-30
2,632 reads
Tables that return the value of the data in the table at a particular point of time have been with us since the first relational database, but have always required special queries and constraints, and can be tricky to get right. System-versioned Temporal Tables, new in SQL Server 2016, make such tables behave like any other. How do you create one, or modify an existing table? How can you get an In-Memory Optimized OLTP table to be Temporal? Alex Grinberg shows how.
2017-05-30
3,726 reads
When you are automating a number of tasks, or performing a batch of tests, you want a way of automating the production of your plots and graphs. Nothing beats a good graphical plot for giving the indications of how the process went. If you are using PowerShell and maybe also SQL Server, it pays to use a command-line plotting tool such as Gnuplot to do all the hard work. It turns out to be handy for a range of data jobs, turning PowerShell into a handy data science tool.
2017-05-29
3,301 reads
If you’re a Redgate SQL Backup customer, occasionally you’ll need to convert your SQL Backup (.sqb) files to the native SQL Server backup format (.bak), perhaps to perform native database restores on a server where SQL Backup isn’t installed. This produces a striped backup, because each thread used when making the backup will produce a separate file. Can we use a striped backup produced in this way, or indeed any striped backup, as the source for a SQL Clone image? Short answer: we can! Let’s see how that works.
2017-05-29
2,237 reads
By Steve Jones
This was Redgate in 2010, spread across the globe. First the EU/US Here’s Asia...
By John
Today is Christmas and while I do not expect anybody to actual be reading...
By Bert Wagner
Until recently, my family's 90,000+ photos have been hidden away in the depths of...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Happy Holidays, Let's Do Nerdy...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item UNISTR Escape
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Celebrating Tomorrow
In SQL Server 2025, I run this command:
SELECT UNISTR('*3041*308A*304C\3068 and good night', '*') as "A Classic";
What is returned? (assume the database has an appropriate collation)
A: 
B: 
C: 
See possible answers