SQL Saturday #181 - Tokyo
A free day of training, SQL Saturday comes to Tokyo, Japan. Come have a SQL Server day with fellow data professionals if you can.
Returning the Top X row for each group (SQL Spackle)
One of the most common T-SQL questions is on returning a ranked result set for each member of a group. Dave Ballentyne brings us a short tutorial on how you can do this in T-SQL.
The SQL Server Pro Awards
Phil Factor is pleasantly surprised by the SQL Server Pro awards, and talks about the thinking behind Down Tools Week.
SQL Server Transaction Log Fragmentation: a Primer
Generally, you will have no need to worry about the number of virtual log files in your transaction log. However, if you use the default settings for 'auto-grow', you can end up with such 'fragmentation' in your transaction log as to affect performance noticably. How can this be avoided? How can you tell it's a problem? What do you do about it? Greg explains.
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.
Blogs
AI: Blog a Day – Day 7: Vector and Vector Databases
By Vinay Thakur
Continuing from Day 6 we learned Embeddings, Semantic Search and Checks, on Day 7...
AI: Blog a Day – Day 6: Embeddings – How AI Understands
By Vinay Thakur
Continuing from Day 5 where we covered notebooks, HuggingFace and fine tuning AI now...
The Book of Redgate: Mistakes
By Steve Jones
This is kind of a funny page to look at. The next page has...
Forums
Why End-User Testing Is Even More Important with AI
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Why End-User Testing Is Even...
Dynamic Unpivot
I have a table I didn't design that has tons of repeating groups in...
Writing as an Art and a Job
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Writing as an Art and...
Question of the Day
String Similarity II
What is the range for the result from the EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY() function in SQL Server 2025?
See possible answers