A New Type of Colocation Facility
Microsoft is working on their generation 4 data centers, which might be a great idea for companies if they can implement a private cloud.
Custom Metric - Indexes with Excessive Writes
A new custom metric is available at SQL Monitor Metrics. This tracks indexes that have more writes than reads. Use this code if you want to find out if you might be over indexing your tables.
SQL Server 2012 Integration Services - Introduction to Managing SQL Server with PowerShell
Marcin Policht presents the fundamental principles of PowerShell in the context of SQL Server 2012. Join him as he steps through its initial setup and configuration, and reviews specific management areas where its advantages can be realized.
Stairway to XML: Level 9 - Creating XML-Based Functions
In this Level, we’ll look at how to use XML methods within user-defined functions to return XML fragments and values from your target XML instance.
The Knowledge Graph
Google has a new project to use a "database of everything" to help you learn more.
SQL Server Performance Tuning – Index Tuning
In earlier installments of this series we looked at T-SQL Performance optimizations along with different T-SQL practices, we can now turn our attention to the second part of this series which is index Tuning
Acing an Audit
Audits for technology groups can be time consuming and stress employees out. An article Steve Jones finds says an insurance company only needed 30 minutes to ace their audit.
My SQL Server Database is Corrupt - Now What?!
How do you recover from corruption if your organization doesn't have a disaster recovery handbook? And how can you prevent the same corruption from recurring?
Providing SQL Agent Job Log Data for Developers
As a production Database Administrator, I do not want to give Developers direct access to the SQL Server Agent job log especially for servers in the DMZ. Another problem we have is that when there is a lot of log data for a job, the default job log doesn't contain the full log detail and that makes it harder to troubleshoot. Most of all, we are trying not to use a different code set for deployment based on the environment. Basically we want to use the same methods to deploy our jobs to Development, Test and Production.
Not Pulling the Plug Out
Phil Factor on his renewed appreciation for the "customer-focused" culture of the Data Platform Group at Microsoft
Blogs
Advice I Like: Respect
By Steve Jones
“Don’t aim to have others like you; aim to have them respect you.” –...
Setting Up a Mac for Data Engineering and AI Work
If you work with data pipelines, SQL, notebooks, or machine learning models, a Mac...
Want to look at cloud reporting but not sure what the costs will be?
By ChrisJenkins
Have you been thinking about migrating your reporting to Microsoft Fabric or Snowflake but...
Forums
SQL Art, Part 4: Happy 4th of July — A British DBA's Guide to Celebrating a War We Don't Talk About
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Art, Part 4: Happy...
SQL Server Enum Implementation: A Single-Row View Strategy for Avoiding Magic Values
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server Enum Implementation: A...
BIT_COUNT I
Comments posted to this topic are about the item BIT_COUNT I
Question of the Day
BIT_COUNT I
In SQL Server 2025, I have a table (dbo.UserPermission) that contains this data:
UserID UserPermissions 15 23 37What is returned when I run this code:
select bit_count(UserPermissions) as PermissionCount from dbo.UserPermission where UserID = 3;See possible answers