Additional Articles


External Article

Going Interactive with C#

For some time now, C# programmers have gazed enviously at the interactive capabilities of F#, Python and PowerShell. For rapid prototyping work and interactive debugging, dynamic languages are hard to beat. C# Interactive slipped into view quietly, without razzmatazz, in Visual Studio 2015 Update 1. It's good, it's worth knowing about; and Tom Fischer is intent on convincing you of that.

2016-10-11

5,674 reads

External Article

Azure SQL Database - Azure AD Authentication

One of the challenges when considering migrating your on-premises SQL Server databases to Azure SQL Database is its lack of support for Active Directory-integrated authentication. With the advent of Azure SQL Database V12, the authentication capabilities have been expanded, allowing for more flexibility that leverages Azure Active Directory. In this article, Marcin Policht provides an overview of this functionality.

2016-10-10

3,995 reads

External Article

Taking Pictures from HTML

Sometimes a request from a user who doesn't appreciate the limitations of the technology can jolt you into discovering that an application feature that was, until recently, difficult to achieve is suddenly relatively easy. Dino was asked to allow the user to take photographs and associate them with an item of work. After he'd recovered from the shock, he decided that it was achievable, and now describes how he went on and did it.

2016-10-06

4,818 reads

External Article

Managing SQL Server Backup and Restore History Information

Greg Larson explains that SQL Server provides a couple of different ways to delete backup and restore history. If you want to remove backup and restore information for all databases based on a date you can use the sp_delete_backuphistory system stored procedure. Or you can use the system stored procedure named sp_delete_database_backuphistory if you want to remove all backup and restore history for a specific database.

2016-10-04

5,098 reads

External Article

Predicates With Subqueries

The ALL, SOME and ANY predicates aren't much used in SQL Server, but they are there. You can use the Exists() predicate instead but the logic is more contorted and difficult to read at a glance. Set-oriented predicates can greatly simplify the answering of many real-life business questions, so it is worth getting familiar with them. Joe Celko explains.

2016-10-03

8,250 reads

External Article

SQL Server for Linux

Although SQL Server for Linux removes the concern that adopting SQL Server forces you to also adopt the Windows platform, it could also provide a useful alternative platform, and a more obvious alternative to Oracle. There are, however, several obvious concerns as to how such a product could ever achieve parity with the existing Windows-based product. Microsoft have made an interesting move with several ramifications, as Robert Sheldon explains.

2016-09-30

6,963 reads

Blogs

Automatic Index Compaction

By

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

The Goldilocks problem – Materialized Views

By

I’m sure you’ve all heard the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but...

Monday Monitor Tips: Virtual Machine Usage and Cost

By

One of the things I’ve been requesting for a number of years is cost...

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