My online series of articles has been focused on the need for businesses to "get serious" about their approach to developing an enterprise business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW) capability. When pursuing this capability it is important to adopt a holistic view, followed by disciplined investment and execution.
2007-10-26
2,267 reads
2007-10-09
2,360 reads
Collaboration between IT and the business will help identify the reasonable issues versus the issues that cannot be resolved for the current release of the data warehouse.
2007-10-02
2,482 reads
In database planning and design it is essential to plan out how much HD space you are going to need to store your data. If you use BOL and do a search for "Estimating Table Size" you get three articles: - Estimating the size of a table - Estimating the size of a table with […]
2006-06-21 (first published: 2006-06-13)
521 reads
You recently published a script showing how to do pagination (e.g. results 20 - 30 of 100) It's also possible to do it quicker and more elegantly without having to resort to building the sql string dynamically (never a good thing IMHO). You pass in 2 parameters, @PageIndex is the first record you want (so […]
2006-05-31 (first published: 2006-05-24)
1,288 reads
I was going through the painfull optimization of the database of creating better clustered indexes (not the default ones on the primary key).This operation was requiring removing all foreign keys to this table and then recreation them again.I created this script to optimize this quite tidious task.
2006-06-08 (first published: 2005-07-22)
748 reads
Initial analysis of a new source system can be quite time consuming to manually examine tables and columns to determine which even have worthwhile values in the first place. Running this script against the current database will generate useful information for all the columns of all the tables. Details include data types with varchar lengths, […]
2005-06-07
451 reads
Out of the box, Reporting services does not handle divide by zero conditions gracefully. There are plenty of posting on how to use the IIF() function to accomplish this, with some rather horrific looking code. In order to simplify the coding process and make the resulting expressions readable by a mere mortal, I wrote the […]
2006-07-28 (first published: 2005-05-26)
4,015 reads
This script will drop all of the foreign keys on user tables in the database it is executed in. This is useful as a pre-load process.
2005-06-22 (first published: 2005-05-23)
817 reads
This script creates a table based function that returns time dimension that would typically be seen in a data warehouse. The time dimension has aggregate values for week, month, quarter, half, and year.
2005-03-04 (first published: 2005-02-23)
1,254 reads
By Steve Jones
If someone is trying to convince you it’s not a pyramid scheme, it’s a...
By Steve Jones
I was looking back at my year and decided to see if SQL Prompt...
In the era of cloud-native applications, Kubernetes has become the default standard platform for...
Hi experts, I have a 3+ TB database on a 2019 sql server which...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The North Star for the...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Multiple Escape Characters
In SQL Server 2025, I run this code (in a database with the appropriate collation):
SELECT UNISTR('%*3041%*308A%*304C%*3068 and good night', '%*') AS 'A Classic';
What is returned? See possible answers