Back in the EU
I flew to Amsterdam last night and hopefully by the time this publishes I’ll be at my hotel, catching up on messages and prepping for another Simple Talk Podcast...
2025-09-29
17 reads
Blog Posts
Demystifying Fabric Workspaces: The Nerve Center of Your Data Universe
It always starts the same way. You open your laptop on a Monday morning, coffee in hand, ready to tackle the week, only to spend the first hour hunting...
2025-09-29 (first published: 2025-09-04)
289 reads
Managing Enterprise Storage with Pure Storage Fusion in PowerShell - Building Storage Tiers
In modern IT environments, not all workloads require the same level of storage performance, protection, or cost. Some applications need high performance with aggressive data protection, while others are...
2025-09-29 (first published: 2025-09-04)
141 reads
SQL Saturday Boston Slides and Code
Thanks to everyone who attended my sessions today at SQL Saturday Boston 2025. I’ve got resources listed below Slides Here are the slides from my two sessions Running a...
2025-09-27
30 reads
Advice I Like: Fear and Imagination
Fear is fueled by a lack of imagination. The antidote to fear is not bravery; it looks more like imagination – from Excellent Advice for Living What a neat...
2025-09-26
22 reads
Prepping for Certification, Part 1 of ?
I thought it would be good to put my thoughts down on how to prepare for a certification. I don't know how many posts I will make on this,...
2025-09-26 (first published: 2025-09-04)
510 reads
Using Customer Docker Compose File Names
As I use containers more and more to run various things, I decided I not only wanted to set up docker compose files, I wanted to name them something...
2025-09-26 (first published: 2025-09-03)
355 reads
3 things you must do to start data quality management right
As a data & AI strategist who’s seen countless projects succeed and fail, I have learned that data quality management really comes down to building the right foundation from...
2025-09-25 (first published: 2025-09-23)
30 reads
Cloud Data Driven User Group 2025 – Slides & Scripts
The slidedeck and the SQL scripts for the session Indexing for Dummies can be found on Github.
The post Cloud Data Driven User Group 2025 – Slides & Scripts first...
2025-09-25
12 reads
Connect with your SQL Community on Slack
Slack is a popular tool for team interaction. To describe it quickly, it's a feature-rich persistent chat room, with threads,...
2025-09-25 (first published: 2017-05-04)
608 reads
Blogs
Automatic Index Compaction
By ReviewMyDB
Index maintenance has always meant nightly jobs and a window you have to defend....
The Goldilocks problem – Materialized Views
I’m sure you’ve all heard the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but...
Monday Monitor Tips: Virtual Machine Usage and Cost
By Steve Jones
One of the things I’ve been requesting for a number of years is cost...
Forums
SQL Art, Part 4: Happy 4th of July — A British DBA's Guide to Celebrating a War We Don't Talk About
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Art, Part 4: Happy...
How We Handled a Vendor Retry That Loaded Twice in Snowflake
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How We Handled a Vendor...
Cognitive Coverage
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Cognitive Coverage
Question of the Day
Getting the Average
I have this data in the dbo.Commission table in a SQL Server 2022 database.
salesperson commission Brian 12 Brian 16 Andy 7 Andy 14 Andy 21 Steve 20 Steve NULLAll the data is a varchar, and I decide to run this query to get the totals for each salesperson.
SELECT SalesPerson
, AVG(TRY_PARSE(Commission AS int)) AS TotalCommission
FROM commission
GROUP BY SalesPerson
GO
What average commission is calculated for Steve? See possible answers