SQL Server's 'Semantic Search' feature seemed an exciting feature when first shown. Was it really true that Microsoft had come up with a system to rival the industry-leaders, one that could extract the contextual meaning of terms in text, or automatically categorise the subject matter of text? On first inspection, it seems unlikely.
2012-10-18
2,985 reads
Charts are one of the commonest ways of visualizing reports from data. Report Builder provides a way of generating charts and reports that will be intuitive to anyone who has done the same in Excel. Robert Sheldon provides a simple explanation of how to get the best from charts using Report Builder.
2012-10-17
3,668 reads
October's meeting on Thursday 18th will be a virtual meeting which means anyone in the world can attend if they have access to a PC with an internet connection. We are pleased to announce that Grant Fritchey will be giving us 2 sessions.
2012-10-16
2,431 reads
Microsoft IT protects against unplanned Transactional Replication outages and issues by using best practices and proactive monitoring. This results in increased stability, simplified management and improved performance of transactional replication environments.
2012-10-12
5,472 reads
In a previous tip on Monitor Your SQL Server Virtual Log Files with Policy Based Management, we have seen how we can use Policy Based Management to monitor the number of virtual log files (VLFs) in our SQL Server databases. However, even with that most of the solutions I see online involve the creation of temporary tables and/or a combination of using cursors to get the total number of VLFs in a transaction log file. Is there a much easier solution?
2012-10-11
3,321 reads
As the SQL Developer community grows to embrace the benefits of test-driven development for databases, so the importance of learning to do it properly increases. One way of learning effective TDD is by the use of code kata – short practice sessions that encourage test-first development in baby steps. I have a limited number of licences for SQL Test to give away free – just for practicing a bit of TDD and telling me about it.
2012-10-10 (first published: 2012-09-19)
5,923 reads
As you know, SQL Server databases and backup files can take up a lot of disk space. When disk is running low and you need to troubleshoot disk space issues, the first thing to do is to find large files that are consuming disk space. In this article I will show you a PowerShell script that you can use to find large files on your disks.
2012-10-10
3,714 reads
Once again Jonathan Lewis (Oracle Ace Director, OakTable Network) and Grant Fritchey (Microsoft SQL Server MVP) will host a live discussion on Oracle and SQL Server, this time in relation to temporary tables. Will they agree on some common ground? Or will it be an out and out argument? Either way, be prepared for a lively exchange that will not only entertain, but will teach you key concepts on Oracle and SQL Server.
2012-10-10 (first published: 2012-09-13)
7,268 reads
Column Store Index, a new feature in SQL Server 2012, improves performance of data warehouse queries several folds. Arshad Ali shows you how to create column store index, and how to use index query hint to include or exclude a column store index.
2012-10-09
3,471 reads
Recently while working on a project to import data from an Excel worksheet using SSIS, I realized that sometimes the SSIS Package failed even though when there were no changes in the structure/schema of the Excel worksheet. I investigated it and I noticed that the SSIS Package succeeded for some set of files, but for others it failed. I found that the structure/schema of the worksheet from both these sets of Excel files were the same, the data was the only difference. How come just changing the data can make an SSIS Package fail? What actually causes this failure? What can we do to fix it?
2012-10-08
3,887 reads
By Tim Radney
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been contacted by multiple customers experiencing the same...
By Vinay Thakur
These days everything is changing to AI World, IT roles are getting changed and...
I’m doing a small series on indexing basics for SQL Server, and on May...
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On which Linux versions is SQL Server 2025 on Linux supported?
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