What Counts for a DBA: Being Replaceable
Louis Davidson describes why all DBAs should strive to be replaceable, and what that really means.
What’s in YOUR Recovery Plan?
Author Craig Outcalt gives advice on preparing for the worst with a look at what you should consider putting in your disaster recovery plan and why.
Disaster Recovery Planning for Data: The Cribsheet
Planning for disaster recovery and business continuity aren't amongst the most exciting IT activities. They are, however, essential and relevant to any Database Administrator who is responsible for the safety and integrity of the companies' data, since data is a key part of business continuity.
Fixing Gatekeeper Row Cardinality Estimate Issues
The Query Optimiser needs a good estimate of the number of rows likely to be returned by each physical operator in order to select the best query plan from the most likely alternatives. Sometimes these estimates can go so wildly wrong as to result in a very slow query. Joe Sack shows how it can happen with SQL Queries on a data warehouse with a star schema.
Keynotes
This Friday we look forward to the various tech events of 2008 and which speakers you think are worth seeing. This editorial was originally published on Jan 11, 2008. It is being re-run as Steve is traveling.
Database Deployment: The Bits - Copying Data Out
Occasionally, when deploying a database, you need to copy data out to file from all the tables in a database. Phil Factor shows how to do it, and illustrates its use by copying an entire database from one server to another.
Try To Be More Inefficient
Steve Jones is recommending that you don't work the most efficient way at your job. Sometimes. This editorial was originally published on Apr 3, 2008. It is being re-run as Steve is out of town.
Red Gate Wins 8 Awards and You Can Get a Prize
Red Gate won 8 awards in the recent SQL Server Pro annual product reviews. As a celebration, we're giving away a few prizes.
SQL Server 2012 Integration Services - Implementing Package Security using Access Control
SQL Server 2012 Integration Services offers a wide range of powerful features that allow you to streamline and automate tasks involving data extraction, transformation, and loading. However, incorporating these features into your existing business intelligence framework frequently necessitates additional security measures ensuring that data which is being processed remains protected from unauthorized access.
Stairway to SQL Dialects Level 3: MySQL
As part of the LAMP stack, MySQL is incredibly important for providing a reliable and platform-agnostic database platform for web development. This level looks at the syntax of MySQL and how to best port SQL code to a MySQL environment.
Blogs
My Social Media Rules
By Brian Kelley
I developed these rules a while back, before COVID. I had a period of...
Why Use TRY_PARSE(): #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
Someone asked why I would use TRY_PARSE after I posted a question at SQL...
A Guatemalan's Guide to Drinking Coffee Properly
My mugI grew up surrounded by coffee farms in Guatemala and somehow spent most...
Forums
Partitioning a table with TEXTIMAGE_ON option
I have a table that ends in ON [PRIMARY] TEXTIMAGE_ON [PRIMARY]. I'm about to...
OUTER APPLY Fundamentals: Part 2
Comments posted to this topic are about the item OUTER APPLY Fundamentals: Part 2
Building Great Software
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Building Great Software
Question of the Day
The Range of Customers
I have this data in the OrderHeader table in a SQL Server 2025 database (ordered by CustomerID ASC):
orderid orderdate customerid complete 3 2025-05-10 00:00:00.0002 1 21 2024-01-10 00:00:00.0003 1 15 2023-10-28 00:00:00.0004 1 13 2025-03-08 00:00:00.0006 1 11 2024-04-02 00:00:00.0007 1If I run this query, how many rows are returned?
SELECT * from dbo.OrderHeader where customerid between 3 and '6'See possible answers