Additional Articles

All authors

External Article

How to Automatically Create and Refresh Development and Test Databases

In order to be able to deliver database changes more quickly, there are several tasks that must be automated. It can be a daunting job to ensure that the whole team has the latest database build when there is a proliferation of copies, and the database is big. Phil illustrates a solution by taking a set of Redgate tools to show how they can be used together, via PowerShell, to build a database from object-level source, stock it with data, document it, and then provision any number of test and development servers with the database build, taking care to save any DDL changes to the existing copies of the database.

2017-08-08

5,020 reads

External Article

Developing Metadata Design Patterns in BIML

You may have already experienced ETL Hell, where you have a large number of similar of SSIS tasks, and a small change, such as an alteration to the network topology, means that they all need to be altered with the correct connection details. Perhaps you should consider creating design patterns for all the standard components of integration tasks in BIML, and generating the SSIS packages from these? Amarendra walks you through the process.

2017-08-04

6,028 reads

External Article

Query Store and Parameterization Problems

The query store gives us a novel way of identifying those queries that are causing performance problems when they are parameterized by SQL Server for reuse. Although it is relatively simple to ensure that certain troublesome queries avoid the problem, it is laborious to identify these queries. Additionally, Query Store gives us the means to fix the problem for groups of queries by means of plan guides without changing the DDL at all. Dennes Torres explains the details

2017-07-31

5,234 reads

External Article

Statistics in SQL: The Kruskal–Wallis Test

Before you report your conclusions about your data, have you checked whether your 'actionable' figures occurred by chance? The Kruskal-Wallis test is a safe way of determining whether samples come from the same population, because it is simple and doesn't rely on a normal distribution in the population. This allows you a measure of confidence that your results are 'significant'. Phil Factor explains how to do it.

2017-07-27

6,123 reads

All authors

Blogs

AI Helps Me with My Sloppiness

By

I type fairly well. Well, I type fast, but I do wear out a...

WITH clause gets a 26ai boost!

By

By way of background, a while back I did video called “My New Favourite...

Automatic Index Compaction

By

Index maintenance has always meant nightly jobs and a window you have to defend....

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

SQL Art, Part 4: Happy 4th of July — A British DBA's Guide to Celebrating a War We Don't Talk About

By Terry Jago

Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Art, Part 4: Happy...

How We Handled a Vendor Retry That Loaded Twice in Snowflake

By Chandan Shukla

Comments posted to this topic are about the item How We Handled a Vendor...

Cognitive Coverage

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Cognitive Coverage

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

Getting the Average

I have this data in the dbo.Commission table in a SQL Server 2022 database. 

salesperson commission
Brian       12
Brian       16
Andy        7
Andy        14
Andy        21
Steve       20
Steve       NULL
All the data is a varchar, and I decide to run this query to get the totals for each salesperson. 
SELECT SalesPerson
     , AVG(TRY_PARSE(Commission AS int)) AS TotalCommission
 FROM commission
 GROUP BY SalesPerson
GO
What average commission is calculated for Steve?

See possible answers