Monitoring is Essential
One of the keys to better availability, scalability, and performance on your systems is understanding what is happening in the instances. That requires monitoring, which Steve Jones sees as essential.
The Art of SQL Server FILESTREAM by Jacob Sebastian and Sven Aelterman
FILESTREAM is implemented as an extension to the VARBINARY(MAX) data type and allows large object data to be stored in a special folder on the NTFS file system, while bringing that data under the transactional control of SQL Server. This book describes both the way it works and the implementation, administration and troubleshooting of it.
The Data We Give Away
We're all used to storing and protecting data, but how often to we consider the data we're generating every day?
Viewing VMware Counters in PerfMon for SQL Server
I want to ensure that my SQL Server on a VMware Guest OS is getting the resources it should. This would go a long way towards helping isolate the performance problems we're experiencing. However, our system administrators won't give us access to VirtualCenter or any of the tools they use. Is there anything I can do? Check out this tip to learn more.
Reading SQL Server's Transaction Log
This article shows how you can read the [RowLog Contents] in the Transaction Log, for Real!
What Do You Want from SQL in the City?
After the SQL in the City tour wrapped up this week in Seattle, Steve Jones looks back and asks a question. What type of training would be best for you.
Script to create dynamic PIVOT queries in SQL Server
Pivoting is a common reporting requirement - data is stored in columns and you need to present it in rows. This was a nice feature that was added to SQL Server, but you don't always know all of the values you need to pivot on. This tip looks at how you can dynamically create the pivot command to handle these unknown values.
More Than One Way to Skin a Cat
There are many ways to accomplish a task in SQL Server, and almost every technology. But too much choice might not be the best thing for beginners.
Blogs
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...
ADF Pipeline Debugging Fails with BadRequest – The Sequel
A while ago I blogged about a use case where a pipeline fails during...
Forums
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...
String Similarity II
Comments posted to this topic are about the item String Similarity II
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