SQL Intersection in Las Vegas This Spring
Come join Steve Jones, Grant Fritchey and an amazing lineup of speakers at the spring SQL Intersection conference in Las Vegas, April 8-11, 2013. Register now and you get a Surface RT tablet.
DBA Hypochondria
It is easy to become overwhelmed by server symptoms (aka metrics), in the forlorn hope that the more we collect, the clearer a picture we'll assemble of what ails the server. We should, of course, be looking at the whole patient.
Using the Data Profiling SQL Server Integration Services SSIS task
Have you ever had to write a bunch of TSQL to do some data analysis on the table data in your database. If you have you'll know that this can become a fairly time consuming and tedious task? SQL Server 2012 Integration Services has a feature called the Data Profiling task that can help you perform this analysis much easier and faster (this feature is also available in SQL Server 2008). This task can help you find potential issues with your existing data as well as help you become more familiar with the data in a database that you have just started managing.
Baselines
It can be hard to analyze performance without a baseline. This week, Steve Jones asks how you might use your baseline to better determine what problems you are having with your SQL Server.
Join Operations – Nested Loops
This is part I of III in a series on the physical join operators in SQL Server.
Silent Truncation of SQL Server Data Inserts
There are certain circumstances where SQL Server will silently truncate data, without providing an error or warning, before it is inserted into a table. In this tip we cover some examples of when this occurs.
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.
Blogs
Automatic Index Compaction
By ReviewMyDB
Index maintenance has always meant nightly jobs and a window you have to defend....
The Goldilocks problem – Materialized Views
I’m sure you’ve all heard the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but...
Monday Monitor Tips: Virtual Machine Usage and Cost
By Steve Jones
One of the things I’ve been requesting for a number of years is cost...
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...
How We Handled a Vendor Retry That Loaded Twice in Snowflake
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How We Handled a Vendor...
Cognitive Coverage
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Cognitive Coverage
Question of the Day
Getting the Average
I have this data in the dbo.Commission table in a SQL Server 2022 database.
salesperson commission Brian 12 Brian 16 Andy 7 Andy 14 Andy 21 Steve 20 Steve NULLAll the data is a varchar, and I decide to run this query to get the totals for each salesperson.
SELECT SalesPerson
, AVG(TRY_PARSE(Commission AS int)) AS TotalCommission
FROM commission
GROUP BY SalesPerson
GO
What average commission is calculated for Steve? See possible answers