Using Technology In New Ways
An interesting reuse of technology in a completely new way caught Steve Jones' eye. See if you agree that this is rather amazing.
SSIS Basics: Adding Data Flow to Your Package
Annette continues her popular series for SSIS beginners by showing how a data flow task can be used in a package to move data from a SQL Server database to an Excel file, and insert an additional column into the Excel file that’s based on derived data.
Geeky Books
Today Steve Jones talks about one of his pastimes: reading. He recommends you read more, and share the books you enjoy.
Checksum Transformation
The Checksum Transformation computes a hash value, the checksum, across one or more columns, returning the result in the Checksum output column. The transformation provides functionality similar to the T-SQL CHECKSUM function, but is encapsulated within SQL Server Integration Services, for use within the pipeline without code or a SQL Server connection. As featured in The Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit by Joy Mundy and Warren Thornthwaite from the Kimbal Group.
Time Zones
Today Steve Jones complains a bit about time zone support in SQL Server and why it seems so cumbersome. Shouldn't it be easier in 2012?
Implementing SQL Server's Change Data Capture
When SQL Server 2008 was released the Microsoft product group came out with a new feature called "Change Data Capture" that allows you to track the changes that occur to a table. Greg Larsen gives you a primer of how to implement change data capture and how to review the captured information to produce an audit trail of the changes to a database table.
A Cool Job
Today's editorial was originally published on August 21, 2007. It is being re-run as Steve is traveling. What a cool job it must be to try and tune and get the most performance out of a system.
Storage - A meeting of minds
Even if you are not an infrastructure guy a good grasp of storage basics will stand you in good stead
Write Better Code
Better security can be achieved by writing better code. Steve Jones agrees, but doesn't think it's as easy as it sounds.
Provisioning a New SQL Server Instance
Before you even install SQL Server, there a number of preparatory steps you need to take in order to get a new machine with a fresh copy of the operating system completely ready to install SQL Server properly. This is to maximize performance, reliability, and security.
Blogs
Flyway Tips: AI Generating Migration Script Names
By Steve Jones
AI is a big deal in 2026, and at Redgate, we’re experimenting with how...
The Book of Redgate: Get the right stuff done
By Steve Jones
Another of our values: The facing page has this quote: “We admire people who...
Runing tSQLt Tests with Claude
By Ed Elliott
Running tSQLt unit tests is great from Visual Studio but my development workflow...
Forums
No Defaults Passwords Ever
Comments posted to this topic are about the item No Defaults Passwords Ever
Introduction of OPTIMIZE_FOR_SEQUENTIAL_KEY = ON
Hi, We have low latency high volume system. I have a table having 3...
The Long Name
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Long Name
Question of the Day
The Long Name
I run this code to create a table:
When I check the length, I get these results:
A table name is limited to 128 characters. How does this work?