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.
SQL Saturday #167 - Columbus, GA
A free day of training in Columbus, GA. Come meet the local SQL professionals and spend a day talking SQL Server.
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