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Technical Article

Demystifying Oracle's Clustering Factor

One of the more confusing statistics in Oracle is one called the clustering factor. Associated with an index, it's actually dependent on the table data, more specifically the distance between 'jumps' for a given index key. Commonly, a 'jump' is the number of blocks between rows containing the given index key starting with the first block found containing that key. If that sounds confusing don't despair, David Fitzjarrell explains in detail.

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2015-07-29

3,764 reads

Technical Article

The Importance of Maintenance on MSDB

MSDB is a system database used by SQL Server. MSDB stores all sorts of data, such as backup history, log shipping monitor history, SSIS packages and Service Broker queue data to name a few. Just like user databases, MSDB needs regular maintenance, including index optimizations and, more importantly, regular purging. In this article, Tim Radney looks at how neglecting your MSDB can negatively impact on your environment.

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2015-07-28

6,714 reads

External Article

SQL Style Habits: Attack of the Skeuomorphs

Although we like to think that our programming techniques are progressive and in tune with the bleeding edge of software development practices, too often they are directly influenced by restrictions faced when computers first became mainstream in the post-war decades. In this article Joe Celko looks at the history of mainframes, FORTRAN I and COBOL.

2015-07-24

5,006 reads

External Article

Azure Event Hubs

If you need to receive and process a large volume of of packets of data, such as telemetry, or event-log items, it may be worth considering Azure Event hubs. They aren't like traditional messaging but represent more of a stripped down one-way event processing system for large volumes of data. It could represent a good solution to an ever-present problem, but is it ready for production use? Rob Sheldon investigates.

2015-07-22

3,382 reads

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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