The Small Print
In today's guest editorial, Phil Factor issues a stark warning against cunning salesmen and hidden costs in cloud computing.
A Tool for the Job
Phil Factor is puzzled by reading how difficult a relatrional database is to use for certain tasks.
Has tempdb grown since the last restart?
Check tempdb to see if it has been autogrown since the last restart. If it has, there may be an opportunity to improve server performance.
Performance Tuning Re-indexing and Update Statistics – A Case Study
Recently we started experiencing a very strange issue in our production reporting environment where the Re-indexing and Update Statistics operation suddenly began taking more than 2 days to complete and was thus causing blockage in the database which in turn caused impairment in application performance.
Human Power
It's incredible what humans can accomplish when they work on a problem with passion. This editorial was originally published on Mar 20, 2008. It is being re-run as Steve is on vacation.
SSD Lifetimes
This week Steve Jones looks at the expected lifetimes of SSDs and finds one that might be a nice upgrade for your system.
Create SQL Server Analysis Services Partitions using AMO
When you have SSAS cubes with millions of rows of data, it is very helpful to create partitions. If you have a few cubes you could probably do this manually, but if there are many or if you want to automate this process you should look for smarter solutions such as programming the creation of partitions dynamically.
SQL Saturday #179 - Kharkov, Ukraine
SQL Saturday in the Ukraine. If you want a free day of training, sign up and attend.
Blogs
Flyway Tips: AI Helps with Commit Messages
By Steve Jones
At Redgate, we’re experimenting with how AI can help developers and DBAs become better...
Startup scripts in SQL Server containers
I was messing around performing investigative work on a pod running SQL Server 2025...
Using SQL Compare with Redgate Data Modeler
By Steve Jones
Redgate recently released SQL Compare v16, which included a new feature to work with...
Forums
Encoding Strings
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Encoding Strings
Deep Learning and Craftsmanship Matter
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Deep Learning and Craftsmanship Matter
Building a Real-Time Analytics Pipeline with Azure Stream Analytics and SQL Server
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Building a Real-Time Analytics Pipeline...
Question of the Day
Encoding Strings
I have this code in SQL Server 2025. What is the result?
DECLARE @message VARCHAR(50) = 'Hello SQL Server 2025!'; DECLARE @encoded VARCHAR(MAX); SET @encoded = BASE64_ENCODE(@message); SELECT @encoded AS EncodedResult;See possible answers