The Art of Commenting
This week Steve talks about the ways in which comments are important in our code.
2020-01-04
290 reads
Database Weekly
The New Year: A Chance to Start Over
January 1st is the beginning of a new year thanks to Julius Caesar and Pope Gregory XIII. This date is somewhat arbitrary, and many religions and cultures celebrate their own beginning of a new year at different times. Even though these celebrations don’t fall at the same time, I think the sentiment is similar. The […]
2019-12-28
127 reads
Learn to Change
This week Grant talks about the need for change and growth to adapt to the changing world.
2019-12-21
170 reads
Using All Your Tools
Steve looks at a number of tools that you should spend time learning and building a level of comfort that enables you to use them in your daily work.
2019-12-07
321 reads
How SQL Server Can Just Go Faster
It’s rare to get a call from a customer telling you that the application is fast today and thanks for taking such good care of the database. Instead, you are more likely to hear complaints when things go wrong like slow running queries and timeouts. There is a lot to consider when trying to figure […]
2019-11-30
594 reads
A Big Week for the Data Platform
Steve highlights a few items from a busy Microsoft and SQL Server news week.
2019-11-09
235 reads
A Faster tempdb
I like to call tempdb the “workhorse” of SQL Server. I’ve heard some other people call it other terms that were not so flattering, but since I like to keep things positive, I’ll stick with workhorse. SQL Server uses tempdb for many things. The obvious uses are temp tables and table variables, but tempdb is […]
2019-11-02
1,156 reads
Become a Technological Historian
This week Grant muses on how history can impact our decisions moving forward, and having a little empathy can be useful when re-examining the past.
2019-10-26
159 reads
2019-10-12
235 reads
Which Service in Azure Should You Use for SQL?
I remember when Azure SQL Database was first released in 2010. Microsoft has tweaked the name a couple of times over the years, and back then it was called SQL Azure. The largest database you could create was just 50 GB, and there were quite a few restrictions, such as heaps not being supported. Since […]
2019-10-05
463 reads
Blogs
Advice I Like: Respect
By Steve Jones
“Don’t aim to have others like you; aim to have them respect you.” –...
Setting Up a Mac for Data Engineering and AI Work
If you work with data pipelines, SQL, notebooks, or machine learning models, a Mac...
Want to look at cloud reporting but not sure what the costs will be?
By ChrisJenkins
Have you been thinking about migrating your reporting to Microsoft Fabric or Snowflake but...
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...
locking down agent for new user on our dev machine
hi , a new user wants to be able to add sql agent jobs...
SQL Server Enum Implementation: A Single-Row View Strategy for Avoiding Magic Values
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server Enum Implementation: A...
Question of the Day
BIT_COUNT I
In SQL Server 2025, I have a table (dbo.UserPermission) that contains this data:
UserID UserPermissions 15 23 37What is returned when I run this code:
select bit_count(UserPermissions) as PermissionCount from dbo.UserPermission where UserID = 3;See possible answers