Percentiles give meaning to measurements by telling you the percentage of the population being measured who get higher or lower values. They are now easier to calculate in SQL, and are useful for reporting; but are the new analytic functions faster and more efficient than the older methods? Dwain Camps demonstrates, and investigates their relative performance.
2015-05-27
7,757 reads
SQL Server batch processes are usually run from SQL Agent in the background. Often, the responsibility for creating these tasks belongs entirely to the developer. Dennes Torres demonstrates that DBAs can advise and assist with this type of batch job to help reduce their impact on the working system.
2015-05-25
7,564 reads
In a development team, there are times when the relationships between developers and testers can become strained. How can you turn this potential conflict into something more positive? Is it part of the skill of team-working to find ways of avoiding friction, or should one blame a system that relies on good social skills to work well?
2015-05-22
11,013 reads
Tibor Nagy has put together some best practices to help SQL Server DBAs navigate the many different requirements around PCI compliance.
2015-05-21
6,930 reads
Michael Fal is a huge advocate of automation and many ways it can improve the lives of developers and DBAs alike, but you can’t just automate all your problems...
2015-05-20
8,468 reads
Starting with SQL Server 2008 a new feature which allowed us to create compressed backup files by pre-allocating space. This tip will look at the performance impacts of disabling pre-allocation of space using the 3042 SQL Server trace flag.
2015-05-19
6,584 reads
One of the shocks that a developer can get when starting to program in T-SQL is that there is no simple way of generating documentation for routines, structures and interfaces, in the way that Javadocs or Doxygen provides. To embed the documentation in the source is so obvious and easy that it is a wrench to be without this facility. Phil Factor suggests a solution.
2015-05-18
9,083 reads
If you are aiming to optimise the use of your time by doing as much as possible via scripting, you will soon want to run scripts in parallel to save time. PowerShell does not demand that you run jobs one after the other; It has the means to launch actions whenever you wish and to obtain the results when you want them.
2015-05-15
9,082 reads
Learn how to use the TOP clause in conjunction with the UPDATE, INSERT and DELETE statements.
2015-05-14
11,622 reads
It is no good doing some or most of the aspects of SQL Server security right. You have to get them all right, because any effective penetration of your security is likely to spell disaster. If you fail in any of the ways that Robert Sheldon lists and describes, then you can't assume that your data is secure, and things are likely to go horribly wrong.
2015-05-13
9,527 reads
A while back I wrote a quick post on setting up key mappings in...
By Steve Jones
In 100 years a lot of what we take to be true now will...
At Saturday the 21st of February I’m presenting an introduction to dimensional modelling at...
Hello, I inherited a number of tables with like 20-30 column using nvarchar(256) in...
Hi, i'm running vs2022. I'm trying out a c# script that i'd like to...
I upgraded a SQL Server 2019 instance to SQL Server 2025. I wanted to test the fuzzy string search functions. I run this code:
SELECT JARO_WINKLER_DISTANCE('tim', 'tom')
I get this error message:Msg 195, Level 15, State 10, Line 1 'JARO_WINKLER_DISTANCE' is not a recognized built-in function name.What is wrong? See possible answers