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.
Data Access Tracing in SQL Server 2012
Learn how to apply the tracing functionality in Microsoft data access technologies such as ADO.NET 2.0, MDAC 2.82, SQL Server Native Client, and the JDBC driver; and in the SQL Server network protocols and the Microsoft SQL Server database engine.
An Interview with Amazon Web Services
A short interview with Sundar Raghavan of Amazon Web Services about SQL Server and their support and offerings of cloud data services.
Blogs
Excellent article on securing msdb
By Brian Kelley
Fabiano Amorim has written an excellent article at Simple Talk on securing msdb. Here's...
T-SQL Tuesday #201: Temp Tables
By Steve Jones
This month we have a new host, which I am grateful for. So many...
When Do You Reach For A #temp Table?
I needed to do some research because there is more to #temp tables than...
Forums
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
The Range of Customers
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Range of Customers
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