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
“We love to debate minutiae”
By Brian Kelley
I am guilty as charged. The quote was in reference to how people argue...
Advice I Like: Knots
By Steve Jones
Learn how to tie a bowline knot. Practice in the dark. With one hand....
Shifting Mindsets: Why FinOps is Essential for Cloud Efficiency
By HeyMo0sh
As a DevOps practitioner, I’ve always focused on performance, scalability, and automation. But as...
Forums
how to write this query?
Hi everyone I asked this earlier but the desired outcome is a bit different...
Windows logins for users migrated from DomainA to DomainB
Hi, I have a SQL Server instance where users connect to via Windows Authentication,...
Multiple Deployment Processes
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Multiple Deployment Processes
Question of the Day
Upgrading Admin Queries
I have a query from a former DBA that we run on SQL Server 2025 to check on database metadata. This query references sys.sysaltfiles. I want to refactor this code to be more modern. Which DMV should I reference instead?
See possible answers