How Often Do I Backup my Log?
Do you know how often to back up your SQL Server transaction log? Steve Jones has a few thoughts today and notes that you definitely need to know how to restore the log backups.
2014-02-12
541 reads
Editorial
The Data Platform Vision
Microsoft published a vision for their data platform and SQL Server recently. Steve Jones has a few thoughts on what this means for you. Hint: it's cloudy.
2014-02-11
130 reads
Performance Tuning Through Panic
We've all been there, trying to improve performance in a panic situation and not making things better.
2014-02-10
383 reads
Top Talent Leaves
Why do employees leave their companies? There are a variety of reasons, but when your most talented people leave, that's a concern. Steve Jones comments on what we might do about this.
2017-10-19 (first published: 2014-02-10)
387 reads
Oddball Interview Questions
Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren. He talks about strange questions in interviews and whether they help you assess the candidate.
2014-02-07
382 reads
The Cloud
Steve Jones likes the Cloud and gives a few reasons why. He also thinks we'll see more data in the cloud over time.
2014-02-06
193 reads
2014-02-05
657 reads
Zombie Data
Old data can come back to haunt you. Steve Jones talks about potential problems when data comes back to life.
2014-02-04
162 reads
Big Data Comes to Hiring
Big Data is being used to analyze more and more data to produce better decisions. However that doesn't always work as people might expect. Steve Jones talks about some of the issues with using Big Data in hiring.
2014-02-03
175 reads
Adding to SQL Server
This week Steve Jones wonders what you might want to add to SQL Server. With SQL Server 2016 likely in the early planning stages, where would you want to see the development effort focused.
2014-01-31
236 reads
Blogs
SQL Saturday Boston Slides and Code
By Steve Jones
Thanks to everyone who attended my sessions today at SQL Saturday Boston 2025. I’ve...
Scaling SQL Server 2025 Vector Search with Load-Balanced Ollama Embeddings
SQL Server 2025 introduces native support for vector data types and external AI models....
Advice I Like: Fear and Imagination
By Steve Jones
Fear is fueled by a lack of imagination. The antidote to fear is not...
Forums
How to use data pre-computed in previous ETL SSIS Nodes?
I'm building ETL packages in SSIS. My data comes from an OLE DB Source...
Building AI Governance and Policies- First Steps
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Building AI Governance and Policies-...
Simple delete causes table scan on other tables with foreign key
Why is sql doing a full scan VS seeking on the index? I've included...
Question of the Day
Checking Identities
The DBCC CHECKIDENT command is used when working with identity values. I have a table with 10 rows in it that looks like this:
TravelLogID CityID StartDate EndDate 1 1 2025-01-11 2025-01-16 2 2 2025-01-11 2025-01-16 3 3 2025-01-11 2025-01-16 4 4 2025-01-11 2025-01-16 5 5 2025-01-11 2025-01-16 6 6 2025-01-11 2025-01-16 7 7 2025-01-11 2025-01-16 8 8 2025-01-11 2025-01-16 9 9 2025-01-11 2025-01-16 10 10 2025-01-11 2025-01-16The docs for DBCC CHECKIDENT say this if I run with only the table parameter: "If the current identity value for a table is less than the maximum identity value stored in the identity column, it is reset using the maximum value in the identity column. " I run this code:
DELETE dbo.TravelLog WHERE TravelLogID >= 9
GO
DBCC CHECKIDENT(TravelLog, RESEED)
GO
INSERT dbo.TravelLog
(
CityID,
StartDate,
EndDate
)
VALUES
(4, '2025-09-14', '2025-09-17')
GO
What is the identity value for the new row inserted by the insert statement above? See possible answers