When SQL Server 2005 was released, the new XML features were much hyped, and that hype has been reflected in subsequent certification exams. Now, 12 years later, the prevalence of...

What exactly will you be doing, building and administrating the data warehouse, essentially a one-man show?
Managing a team of data warehouse developers?

The following books cover requirements gathering,...

Four years down the road, and we now find ourselves in a society even more divided by identity and tribalism. However, I will say that those of us who work...

If you don't know the covered material and have no interest in learning, then why bother sitting for the exam? Perhaps the Administration or Azure related example would be more...

As far as I know, the only CLR based functions we're using across the enterprise is a 3rd party library called Voltage for encryption and decryption on personal identifier columns....

Issues with the server's cooling fan can cause the CPU to intermittently slow down or freeze, and the same for system processes like virus scanner or auto updates.

If you have a change control process and/or continuous integration process in place, then you can refer to that to see what recent deployments have occurred, not just on the...

I like INFORMATION_SCHEMA views because they are denormalized and easy to use. For example, the COLUMNS view returns information that would require joining a half dozen SYS tables. If I...

The crux of this equation is the Understanding part and how much risk all parties involved are willing to take. Branson's company is quite large today, and a lot of...

Law enforcement should setup special phone numbers and credit card numbers for use in seeding honeypot databases. For example, the hacker steals a list of credit card information from an...

For a non-IT related profession: chef, documentary film maker, crime scene investigator. However, if I were to give up my current job in IT, I'd really have to scale back...

If these columns will potentially be updated at a later point, then stick with CHAR, because updating NULL-able VARCHAR columns can result in change of row size, page splits, and...