The Build Buy Debate
Does it make more sense for a company to build it's own software or buy a package?
Matrix Math in SQL
Relational Datbases have tables as data structures, not arrays. This makes it tricky and slow to do matrix operations, but it doesn't mean it is impossible to do. Joe gives the Celko Slant on how to go about doing Matrix Math in SQL.
Dog Food
Should you dog food your own software? Steve Jones thinks this is a good idea if it works for your particular product.
Remote DBAs
There's still hope for all you DBAs out there looking for a telecommuting job that allows you to work in your pajamas. Someone sent me this case study about remote DBAs and I decided to pass it along. It's a one page PDF, and it's a fluff piece to some extent for Bluewolf, a company that has outsourced IT staffing, but has a section on remote DBA work as well
What a View
I need to create views? How many? Today? This article talks about a few issues with using views too extensively in your design.
Protecting the SQL Server Backup folder
I want to backup my SQL Server databases to a folder, but I want to minimize who has access to the folder. In other words, I want to make sure that members of the Windows Local Administrators group don't get to the backups without intentionally trying to bypass the security. How do I do that?
Challenge Yourself
Challenge yourself to find new tools and use them in your work. That's today's message from Steve Jones. (This editorial was originally published on Aug 5, 2007. It is being re-run as Steve is away on the SQL in the City US 2012 tour.)
Fragmentation Fear
Index fragmentation can certainly cause performance problems, but should it really dictate the way we design our clustered indexes?
Report Builder 3.0: Formatting the Elements in your Report
There is a lot that can be done to make basic tabular reports more readable, using Microsoft's free Report Builder. Rob Sheldon continues his exploration of the power of this tool by showing how to format various elements within reports
A simple T-SQL statement to create a list of lookup values
In this article, we provide a simple way to get a comma delimited list from a table of entries without having to use a CURSOR or a WHILE loop to read through the table.
Blogs
In-Person CISA Training – April 13-16, 2026
By Brian Kelley
I will be leading an in-person Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) exam prep class...
EightKB 2026
EightKB is back again for 2026! The biggest online SQL Server internals conference is...
The FinOps Lifecycle: From Budgeting to Reporting
By HeyMo0sh
Working in DevOps long enough teaches you two universal truths: That’s exactly why I...
Forums
query to track time spent on individual tasks in SSIS
Hi everyone I am looking at building a query to determine how much time...
SQL Server Transactional Replication from Always On Availability Groups to Azure SQL Database
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server Transactional Replication from...
Hidden Heroes
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Hidden Heroes
Question of the Day
Identities and Sequences I
When thinking of the Identity property for auto incrementing columns and sequences for the same action, which are explicitly linked to increment a number in a table when a new row is added?
See possible answers