The goal of this Stairway series is to provide a brief, practical and systematic guide to source controlling your SQL Server databases, so that you can then manage your ongoing development and deployment from a known version, within source control.
2014-04-16
3,078 reads
The possibilities for programming SQL Server platform were greatly enhanced with the addition of the SQLCLR subsystem. This allows code written in any .NET language to be incorporated into your SQL Server instance and called from a stored procedure or function. You can also create your own data types or aggregates for specialized purposes. This Stairway series will teach you how to get started writing your own CLR code and integrating it into SQL Server.
2013-12-27
14,171 reads
Following on from his Stairway to T-SQL DML, Gregory Larsen covers more advanced aspects of the T-SQL language such as subqueries.
2013-11-11
15,305 reads
Biml is a markup language that enables you to quickly represent a variety of database related models and constructs, including SSIS packages, models, permissions and more. This stairway helps you get started using the language to represent your objects.
2013-07-09
7,358 reads
XML has been part of the SQL Standard since 2003, and it is also essential for any DBA because so many of the dynamic management views return XML data. Now that the industry is more used to data defined by document markup, it is becoming more important than ever for Database Developers and DBAs to understand the technology and to know where it makes sense to use XML. In this series of articles, Robert Sheldon flexes his talent to make the complicated seem simple.
Note: This series of articles is now available as an eBook.
2012-08-14
6,355 reads
PowerShell is a powerful scripting tool that allows you to automate routine tasks, and script administrative tasks, allowing you to automate a lot of the routine work in a SQL environment. Ben Miller's Stairway Series introduces PowerShell from the beginning, guiding you through how to configure and get started with the framework before working towards more advanced scripting.
2012-06-14
11,976 reads
The SQL language has developed many dialects over the years, with MySQL, PostgreS and Oracle all popular extensions of the core language. This Stairway Series gives an overview of how SQL dialects formed and looks at some of the most commonly-used dialects in detail.
2012-04-13
1,271 reads
Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) can be used in formulas or expressions to calculate and return information from data already in our Power BI models. This Stairway series serves as a progressive introduction to DAX within the context of Power BI, examining the functions, operators and values involved, and examining their operation in practice examples. As a part of introducing DAX functions and overall capabilities, the Levels of the series will also offer a wealth of practical exposure to Power BI features as a part of putting DAX to work in our data models and visualizations.
2024-01-16 (first published: 2011-08-09)
19,261 reads
When things are going well, there is no need to be particularly conscious of what the transaction log does or how it works. You just need to be confident that every database has the correct backup regime in place. When things go wrong, an understanding of the transaction log is important for taking corrective action, particularly when a point-in-time restore of a database is required, urgently! Tony Davis gives just the right level of detail that every DBA should know.
2011-05-19
5,530 reads
IT projects can hit problems that turn out to be due to an insufficient understanding of the basic data and data-types, rather than the database design. It is a sorely neglected topic that might seem to be trivial, but certainly isn't. The DBA, with a broad perspective on corporate data can do a great deal to help application developers to avoid the common mistakes that so often happen, and Joe Celko's Stairway gives the busy IT professional a crash course to understanding the nature of the data being processed.
2019-03-26 (first published: 2011-04-07)
4,877 reads
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Is it possible to recover data from a non-clustered index on the firstname and lastname columns in case of corruption?