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
Automatic Index Compaction
By ReviewMyDB
Index maintenance has always meant nightly jobs and a window you have to defend....
The Goldilocks problem – Materialized Views
I’m sure you’ve all heard the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but...
Monday Monitor Tips: Virtual Machine Usage and Cost
By Steve Jones
One of the things I’ve been requesting for a number of years is cost...
Forums
SQL Art, Part 4: Happy 4th of July — A British DBA's Guide to Celebrating a War We Don't Talk About
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Art, Part 4: Happy...
How We Handled a Vendor Retry That Loaded Twice in Snowflake
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How We Handled a Vendor...
Cognitive Coverage
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Cognitive Coverage
Question of the Day
Getting the Average
I have this data in the dbo.Commission table in a SQL Server 2022 database.
salesperson commission Brian 12 Brian 16 Andy 7 Andy 14 Andy 21 Steve 20 Steve NULLAll the data is a varchar, and I decide to run this query to get the totals for each salesperson.
SELECT SalesPerson
, AVG(TRY_PARSE(Commission AS int)) AS TotalCommission
FROM commission
GROUP BY SalesPerson
GO
What average commission is calculated for Steve? See possible answers