Stairway to SQL Dialects Level 1: Overview
In the first level of his Stairway to SQL Dialects, Joe Celko looks at the origins of the SQL language and how the language has spawned the various different dialects in use today.
SQL Server Reporting Services 2012 Permissions
As you begin developing reports for deployment to a Report Server, what security considerations need to be taken into account in order to grant users access to run a report.
Keeping Your Job
A few thoughts from Steve Jones on how you can help increase your own job security in IT.
Routine Dependency Visualizer
This article contains a T-SQL script that can show you the dependency of all objects in your SQL Server database.
SQL Server 2012 Integration Services - Unattended Execution of SSIS Packages
Quite often, tasks accomplished via SSIS are a part of procedures that run unattended, either scheduled to launch at a particular date and time or triggered by some arbitrarily chosen event. Marcin Policht shares a typical approach to implementing such a scenario.
A Tale of Broken BI
Graphs and charts are dangerous in the wrong hands, and if built on data that is carelessly gathered will mislead as often as they lead. Phil Factor speaks from hard experience.
Stairway to XML: Level 7 - Updating Data in an XML Instance
You need to provide the necessary keywords and define the XQuery and value expressions in your XML DML expression in order to use the modify() method to update element and attribute values in either typed or untyped XML instances in an XML column. Robert Sheldon explains how.
The PoSh DBA: Solutions using PowerShell and SQL Server
PowerShell is worth using when it is the quickest way to providing a solution. For the DBA, it is much more than getting information from SQL Server instances via PowerShell; it can also be run from SQL Server as part of a system that helps with administrative and monitoring tasks.
Understanding Column Properties for a SQL Server Table
Designing a table can be a little complicated if you don’t have the correct knowledge of data types, relationships, and even column properties. In this tip, Brady Upton goes over the column properties and provides examples.
Blogs
A Last Minute Trip to the EU
By Steve Jones
My life has some crazy travel stretches for sure. Between speaking, office visits, customer...
Part 3 of 3: Tuning DiskANN — R, Alpha, L, Beam Width, Recall and Latency
In Part 1, we saw how ‘Vamana’ represents vectors as nodes, connects them with...
Automated SQL Server Benchmarking with HammerDB and Docker: A Complete Testing Framework
I’m excited to announce the release of a new open-source project that fully automates...
Forums
Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in SQL Server 2025: Fixing the Kitchen-Sink Search Procedure
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in...
AI Experience Gap that we keep talking about
Comments posted to this topic are about the item AI Experience Gap that we...
Question of the Day
ORDER BY alias
There is a table tmp_tab:
CREATE TABLE tmp_tab ( id int, val int );
INSERT INTO tmp_tab VALUES (1, 1), (2, NULL), (3, 3), (4, 4), (5, 5);You want to order the rows ids by the following expression:
ISNULL(val, id) + 1Which of the following queries produces the expected ordering and why? (Select all correct) See possible answers