Despite working in IT as both a software developer and database administrator, I'm not a big fan of consumer gadgets or other technology that involves a lot of user interactivity....

homebrew01 (11/10/2016)

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I'm sure it's a long list, but what are the "Top 10" list of improvements I can take to management to help justify spending the $$ to upgrade ??...

Asking your customers to restore a .BAK file or attach an .MDF file will not be possible if they are not on the same version of SQL Server. For that...

In my previous post, I meant to say "setting DelayValidation = TRUE".

I'm sorry you have to learn T-SQL by having a 10,000 line stored procedure dumped on your plate, but this is how most of us got our start.

You can go...

Yes, Itzik's books are good. You should get it.

There are also some good topical books by RedGate. This one is especially good, because it will tech optimization techniques from the...

In most of my SSIS packages, I have one project parameter called @Environment which indicates: 'UNITTEST', 'DEV', 'QA', or 'PROD', and I have (4) parameters for each Connection Manager respectively....

Assuming you want to convert a string to DateTime.

CAST('20161108' AS DATETIME)

If the string contains a value that cannot be converted to a true calendar date (ie: Feb 29, 2015), then...

jshahan (11/7/2016)

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Eric M Russell (11/7/2016)

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jshahan (11/7/2016)

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I had a boss who loved “shiny for shiny’s sake”. This boss was not an evil doer (actually one of the best managers I...

I occasionally use DTM (Do The Math) or it's extended form DTFM (Do The Freaking Math) when presented with a suggestion that obviously doesn't compute financially or logistically.

jshahan (11/7/2016)

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I had a boss who loved “shiny for shiny’s sake”. This boss was not an evil doer (actually one of the best managers I ever had) but this...

TheSQLGuru (11/7/2016)

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Eric M Russell (11/7/2016)

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TheSQLGuru (11/4/2016)

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Eric M Russell (11/4/2016)

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Or you could leave the columns as is and add page compression, which in this case would probably shrink the table down...

Check the wait_type column of dm_exec_requests to see if it's in an extended CXPACKET wait state. That's practically obligatory and normal for a large index operation running in parallel mode....

Phil Factor (11/7/2016)

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@eric So why no ODBC for DocumentDB so far?

That announcement startled everyone in fact, it turned out that this announcement was only about the deprecation of Microsoft...

Did the BlkBy column indicate if the process was in a blocked state? If so, then the column would contain the SPID of the blocking process.