Unprofessional Employers
This Friday Steve Jones talks about training and employers, and who has the responsibility for your knowledge? Let us know if you think your employer shares the burden with you.
Exporting Master Data from Master Data Services
This white paper describes how to export master data from Microsoft SQL Server Master Data Services (MDS) using a subscription view, and how to import the master data into an external system using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). The white paper provides a step-by-step sample for creating a subscription view and an SSIS package.
The Technical Nuances of Technical Writing
A helpful guide to writing technical papers by focusing on the non-technical elements.
Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V
Steve Jones talks about the improvements in Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012. These days there isn't a good reason to avoid considering virtualization for SQL Servers.
Exploring Semantic Search Key Term Relevance
SQL Server's 'Semantic Search' feature seemed an exciting feature when first shown. Was it really true that Microsoft had come up with a system to rival the industry-leaders, one that could extract the contextual meaning of terms in text, or automatically categorise the subject matter of text? On first inspection, it seems unlikely.
Manage By Delegation
There always seem to be more and more instances to manage, but not more and more staff. Steve Jones talks about the key to good management being delegation of the work.
Stairway to XML: Level 6 - Inserting Data into an XML Instance
The modify method lets you manipulate XML data using XML DML. It can insert, alter or delete data. In this level, Robert shows how to use the method to insert a node into an XML instance.
Report Builder 3.0: Adding Charts to Your Report
Charts are one of the commonest ways of visualizing reports from data. Report Builder provides a way of generating charts and reports that will be intuitive to anyone who has done the same in Excel. Robert Sheldon provides a simple explanation of how to get the best from charts using Report Builder.
I'm Not a Rock Star
Steve Jones reflects on the SQL in the City tour that recently wrapped up in the US.
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