Finding a Balance
This editorial was originally published on Nov 19, 2007. It is being republished as Steve is on vacation. With the tremendous amount of digital storage that people can carry around these days, how do you balance the security risks.
Why is my transaction log full?
Why does the transaction log fill up? There are a variety of reasons, and MVP Gail Shaw walks you through the various things to check.
AlwaysOn Architecture Guide: Building a High Availability and Disaster Recovery Solution by Using AlwaysOn Availability Groups
SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Groups provides a unified high availability and disaster recovery (HADR) solution that improves upon legacy functionality previously found across disparate features. Prior to SQL Server 2012, several customers used database mirroring to provide local high availability within a data center, and log shipping for disaster recovery across a remote data center. With SQL Server 2012, this common design pattern can be replaced with an architecture that uses availability groups for both high availability and disaster recovery. This paper details the key topology requirements of this specific design pattern, including quorum configuration considerations, steps required to build the environment, and a workflow that shows how to handle a disaster recovery event in the new topology.
The Personal Checksum
An interesting method of preventing restaurant fraud and a poll for other ways to determine the accuracy of data. This editorial was originally published on Nov 2, 2007. It is being republished as Steve is on vacation.
Using nmap to scan for SQL Servers on a network
I need to try and find all SQL Servers, not just the ones in my domain. We know there are a couple of appliances that are potentially running SQL Server and we want to see them, too. What can I use to do this?
Watch Your Mouth
The way you talk creates an impression at others. Steve Jones reminds us that we should be careful about using foul language.
The Seven Sins against T-SQL Performance
There are seven common antipatterns in T-SQL coding that make code perform badly, and three good habits which will generally ensure that your code runs fast. If you learn nothing else from this list of great advice from Grant, just keep in mind that you should 'write for the optimizer'.
AlwaysOn Availability Groups in SQL Server 2012
This article discusses and demonstrates AlwaysOn Availability groups in SQL Server 2012, a new feature for high availability.
Shadow IT
There are often Shadow IT groups in many companies. Steve Jones talks about the potential problems of these groups, and how he has dealt with them in the past.
Export images from a SQL Server Table to a Folder with SSIS
Can I export images from SQL Server to a file in Windows? What SQL Server options are available to do so? Check out this tip to learn more.
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