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
KDA: Echoes of Deception - Case 6
By Zikato
A cryptic message, a book cipher hidden in art provenance records, and a trail...
Capturing My Own Metrics: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
A customer was trying to compare two tables and capture a state as a...
Red Flags in Your Query (T-SQL Tuesday #200)
By Zikato
When I'm looking at a query, I bet it's bad if I see... a...
Forums
BIT_COUNT II
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I Can't Make You Learn
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Why Your SQL Permissions Disappeared
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Question of the Day
BIT_COUNT II
In SQL Server 2025, I have a table (dbo.UserPermission) that contains this data:
UserID UserPermissions 15 23 37 4 NULLWhat is returned when I run this code:
select bit_count(UserPermissions) as PermissionCount from dbo.UserPermission where UserID = 4;See possible answers