Canceling Customers
Today's editorial was originally published on Sept 4, 2007. It is being re-run as Steve is on holiday. Today Steve talks about the problems with customer service, and how some companies respond.
Simple Steps to Prepare Mirror Database for Mirroring in SQL Server
To prepare a database for mirroring, you need to perform the following steps: Script the restore of the latest full database backup, script the restore of every transaction log backup that has been made after that full database backup, copy the full database backup and transaction log backups to the mirror server, and run the restore scripts on the mirror server.
In this tip I will walk through these steps and provide sample scripts to prepare a database for mirroring.
The Cult of Mediocrity
This guest editorial from Michael Coles was originally published on Aug 1, 2007. It is being re-run as Steve is on vacation. Today Michael talks about the potential for reward for taking risk.
PASS Data Architecture VC presents Neil Hambly on Improve Data Quality & Integrity using Constraints
On Tuesday June 19th 12PM noon Central, Neil Hambly will discuss "Leveraging the power of constraints to improve both data quality and performance of your databases."
The Strategic Value of Monitoring SQL Servers
Why would you ever need to automatically monitor the SQL Servers in your care? What is the business value of doing so? What are the important features that a DBA should look for in a performance-monitoring tool? Rodney Landrum gives answers based on long experience.
Change Tracking - 2008
Change tracking in SQL Server 2008 enables applications to obtain only changes that have been made to the user tables, along with the information about those changes.
The Certification Debate
Today's editorial was originally published on Aug 7, 2007. It is being re-run as Steve is on holiday. Is it worth getting certificated? Steve raises the question today.
The Redmond Agenda
Is there an agenda in Redmond that looks to the cloud first for new versions of the platforms? Steve Jones thinks if there is, it might be a good thing.
Using ASCMD to run command line scripts for SQL Server Analysis Services
Sometimes it would be helpful to run scripts from a command line for Analysis Services. This would be useful for things like creating backups, processing data or running other tasks. Is there a command line tool like sqlcmd for multidimensional databases and Data Mining?
Creating Indicator and Gauge Report in SSRS - SQL Server 2008 R2
SQL Server Reporting Services allows you to embed indicators and Gauges in your report to analyze the data and its state. Indicators are minimal gauges that convey the state of a single data value at a glance and are mostly used to represent state value of Key Performance Indicator (KPI).
Blogs
Setting Up a Mac for Data Engineering and AI Work
If you work with data pipelines, SQL, notebooks, or machine learning models, a Mac...
Want to look at cloud reporting but not sure what the costs will be?
By ChrisJenkins
Have you been thinking about migrating your reporting to Microsoft Fabric or Snowflake but...
The Joyful Craftsmen and the Revolt BI join forces
The Joyful Craftsmen has become the new owner of Revolt BI. The merger creates...
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...
Is it worth hiring experts for BI implementation?
When your team is spending more time gathering data manually or generating reports in...
SQL Server Enum Implementation: A Single-Row View Strategy for Avoiding Magic Values
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server Enum Implementation: A...
Question of the Day
BIT_COUNT I
In SQL Server 2025, I have a table (dbo.UserPermission) that contains this data:
UserID UserPermissions 15 23 37What is returned when I run this code:
select bit_count(UserPermissions) as PermissionCount from dbo.UserPermission where UserID = 3;See possible answers