In general XML documents or fragments are held in strings as text markup. In SQL Server, XML variables and columns are instead tokenised to allow rapid access to the data within. This is fine, but can cause some odd problems, such as ' entitization'. What do you do if you need to preserve the formatting? As usual Rob Sheldon comes to our aid.
2012-02-07
4,207 reads
One of the more popular counters used by DBAs to monitor SQL Server performance, the Buffer Cache Hit Ratio, is useless as a predictor of imminent performance problems. Worse, it can be misleading. Jonathan Kehayias demonstrates this convincingly with some simple tests.
2012-02-06
2,967 reads
A benefit of using computed columns is that they can save developers from having to write calculation logic at the application layer; at the table level, the application can simply reference the computed column. In addition, performance can be improved by persisting a computed column and building an index on it.
2012-02-03
2,708 reads
To kick off a series of DBA worst case scenarios, we asked Phil Factor to confess. He came up with a classic: The mistaken belief that a backup WITH CHECKSUM guaranteed a good backup that could be restored, and the ensuing disaster.
2012-02-02
5,280 reads
In a recent MSSQLTips.com question, a user asked how they could get an alert whenever a login failed due to the account being locked out. As with many problems, there are several ways to solve this issue.
2012-02-01
1,962 reads
Row Sampling Transformation and Percentage Sampling Transformation provide data sampling functionality. This functionality is useful in a number of Analysis Services and Data Mining-based scenarios.
2012-01-31
1,836 reads
The most common T-SQL command in use has to be the SELECT statement, it is the bedrock of any SQL Professional's day. Sometimes it's used to snatch some data from a table or two while some quick investigation is done, other times it is at the heart of a stored procedure or view that will inform business decisions for coming months or even years.
2012-01-30
4,672 reads
In this tip, we will see how to build a report which shows the cumulative sales amount for the current month, current quarter (QTD) and current year (YTD) in a single crosstab (tablix) report, which makes it easy to compare the data.
2012-01-27
2,781 reads
Every so often, the question comes up on forums of how to pass a list as a parameter to a SQL procedure or function. Phil Factor provides some examples using XML, and tests them against other popular methods.
2012-01-26
4,027 reads
I recently encountered a situation where the drive hosting Sharepoint Databases in a Staging environment ran out of space. I logged onto the server and found that the msdb database has itself occupied 38 GB of the total disk space. Msdb database generally contain maintenance information for the database such as backups, log shipping and so on.
2012-01-25
2,711 reads
By Vinay Thakur
Continuing from Day 3 where we covered LLM models open/closed and their parameters, Today...
By Steve Jones
One of the nice things about Flyway Desktop is that it helps you manage...
By HeyMo0sh
Microsoft Fabric (not to be confused with the more general term “fabric” in DevOps)...
I'm fairly certain I know the answer to this from digging into it yesterday,...
Hi Team, I am trying to refresh the Azure Synapse Dedicated pool from production...
hi everyone I am not sure how to write the query that will produce...
I have some data in a table:
CREATE TABLE #test_data
(
id INT PRIMARY KEY,
name VARCHAR(100),
birth_date DATE
);
-- Step 2: Insert rows
INSERT INTO #test_data
VALUES
(1, 'Olivia', '2025-01-05'),
(2, 'Emma', '2025-03-02'),
(3, 'Liam', '2025-11-15'),
(4, 'Noah', '2025-12-22');
If I run this query, how many rows are returned?
SELECT *
FROM OPENJSON(
(
SELECT t.* FROM #test_data AS t FOR JSON PATH
)
) t; See possible answers