HASHBYTES – A T-SQL Function

Someone was asking if the HASHBYTES function was a good one to use in T-SQL as far as performance goes.....

Execution plans

Cost of the Cloud

The cloud should bring with it lower costs, and better efficiency, but that's not necessarily the way things are. Microsoft has a great internal project that costs out the cloud for their departments, and this would be a great addition to the public or private clouds.

Why Two Devices

I used to travel with two laptops, one as a backup, however lately I’ve switched to taking the iPad and...

Five Lines of Code

An interesting story on how a database speeds up by changing some application code. Worth the read for sure.
I caught...

Regular Audit Analysis

This Friday Steve Jones asks about how you handle audit data in your environment. Do you regularly analyze the data? Or do you wait for something to go wrong before you check the data.

Setting a Unique Index on a Bit Field

Can you set a unique index on a bit field? Well, you can, but you’d end up with a very...

The Age of Software

Does the age of software matter? Steve Jones talks about this after there was a decision for the SQL 11 tools not to support Windows XP.

Data Compression in SQL Server

Do you know much about data compression? It seems that quite a few people I meet don’t really understand how...

Excel in the Clouds

Today Steve Jones talks about a new use for cloud computing with Excel to analyze large sets of data.