Happy Memorial Day 2012
It's Memorial Day in the US and Steve out is paying tribute to our soldiers and cutting grass on the tractor. He's left you a blooper reel to enjoy.
To Specialize or Not to Specialize: that is the $132,000 Question
In a guest editorial, Rodney Landrum reflects on his career path as a an information-hungry generalist.
Simple step by step process to import MS Access data into SQL Server using SSIS
Sometimes we need to import information from MS Access. We could use the Microsoft SQL Server Migration Assistant, but sometimes we need to add custom transformations and it is necessary to use more sophisticated tools. In this tip, we are going to walk through step by step how to migrate a MS Access table to SQL Server using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS).
A Break from Data
This Friday, before the Memorial Day holiday in the US, Steve Jones wants to know how you would spend your break from work.
The User Defined Server Roles in SQL Server 2012
This article describes how to create user defined server roles and use stored procedures and queries related.
Backups, What Are They Good For?
We've heard the confessional story from Pixar that Toy Story 2 was almost lost due to a bad backup, but sometimes there is no 'almost'. Grant Fritchey casts a sympathetic eye over some catastrophic data losses, and gives advice on how to avoid what he has termed an RGE (résumé generating event).
Making New Infrastructure Investments
One of the areas where the cloud may have the most impact is with new infrastructure improvements. Steve Jones talks about a few companies that are using the cloud in different ways.
SQL Server 2012 Integration Services - Package and Project Parameters
In SQL Server 2012, Microsoft introduced SQL Server Data Tools to accommodate the dynamic nature of SSIS constructs in the form of package and project parameters. This approach lets you combine multi-package projects into a single unit, eliminating the possibility of breaking dependencies between parent and child packages during subsequent deployments.
Work around for calculating age using the SQL Server DateDiff function
Have you ever wanted to compute age, but the results from the DATEDIFF function seemed to be wrong some of the time? This tip covers why the DATEDIFF function does not always reliably compute age.
New features in SQL 2012, the contained database
This article describe the problems about the migration of the databases and logins and the new feature contained databases
Blogs
Funny Money: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
While wandering around the documentation looking for some Question of the Day topics, I...
Why Database AI Agents need Layers?
By Arun Sirpal
Third part in my Ai series with databases. When building AI solutions within the...
Un-Migrating From the Cloud: T-SQL Tuesday #199
By Steve Jones
This month we have a very interesting invitation from Koen Verbeeck. He has hosted...
Forums
How Do the Experts Become Experts?
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How Do the Experts Become...
Stairway to Reliable Database Deployments Level 4 – Preparing for Production Deployment
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Stairway to Reliable Database Deployments...
Secure Communications
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Secure Communications
Question of the Day
Secure Communications
As of June 2026, what is the best version of TLS to use with SQL Server?
See possible answers