Self Service SQL
Self service in IT is something Steve Jones likes, but it doesn't solve all problems, and might end up creating more issues.
Partial Backup and Restore
Shawn McGehee discusses partial backups, how they're used, and how to avoid potential problems when restoring from a partial backup.
PASS Data Architecture VC presents Mike Fal on Eating the Elephant: SQL Server Table Partitioning
On Thursday May 17th 12PM noon Central, Mike Fal will discuss "SQL Server's table partitioning gives the DBA tools to manage this beast and support very large tables in a way where index management and data retrieval..."
A Stock Price Correlation Matrix
Building a Stock Price Correlation Matrix Using TVPs, a CROSS JOIN and the PIVOT Function
Amazon RDs and the PaaS formerly known as Azure
Phil Factor welcomes SQL Server support by Amazon RDS, as an alternative to having Microsoft as service provider as well as software provider, via the PaaS formerly known as Azure.
Is Software Engineering Dead?
Software engineering is seen as a dead end career choice, at least by some people. Steve Jones disagrees.
Snapshot Isolation Level in SQL Server - What, Why and How - Part 1
Snapshot isolation levels improve performance but there are some things to take into consideration when using this feature. Arshad Ali discusses what snapshot isolation levels are, their variants, and why and when we should use them.
Guide to MCITP: SQL Server 2008 BI Developer
A guide to the SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence exams.
Time for Your Career
This week Steve Jones wants to know if you can find time for your professional development. Regularly improving your skills is an important part of your career in technology, and the poll this weeks asks what time you can make for improvement.
The T-SQL of CSV: Comma-Delimited of Errors
Despite the neglect of the basic ODBC drivers over the years, they still afford a neat way of reading from, and writing to, CSV files; and to be able to do so in SQL as if they were tables is somewhat magical. Just to prove it is possible, Phil Factor creates a CSV version of AdventureWorks as a linked server.
Blogs
Flyway Tips: AI Generating Migration Script Names
By Steve Jones
AI is a big deal in 2026, and at Redgate, we’re experimenting with how...
The Book of Redgate: Get the right stuff done
By Steve Jones
Another of our values: The facing page has this quote: “We admire people who...
Runing tSQLt Tests with Claude
By Ed Elliott
Running tSQLt unit tests is great from Visual Studio but my development workflow...
Forums
No Defaults Passwords Ever
Comments posted to this topic are about the item No Defaults Passwords Ever
Introduction of OPTIMIZE_FOR_SEQUENTIAL_KEY = ON
Hi, We have low latency high volume system. I have a table having 3...
The Long Name
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Long Name
Question of the Day
The Long Name
I run this code to create a table:
When I check the length, I get these results:
A table name is limited to 128 characters. How does this work?