An Azure Outage
Recently the Azure service had an outage and Steve Jones has a few comments on this and why it might not be worse than your own company's IT group.
Basics of XML and SQL Server, Part 2: Shredding XML
In Part 2 of this series we will shred an XML document and insert its records into a SQL Server table using both the OpenXML and XQuery methods.
No Significant Fragmentation? Look Closer…
If you are relying on using 'best-practice' percentage-based thresholds when you are creating an index maintenance plan for a SQL Server that checks the fragmentation in your pages, you may miss occasional 'edge' conditions on larger tables that will cause severe degradation in performance. It is worth being aware of patterns of data access in particular tables when judging the best threshold figure to use.
Webinar: SQL Source Control 3.0 Connect your existing source control system to SQL Server
Find out what SQL Source Control & SQL Compare can do for your database development and deployment processes at one of our free weekly webinars. Each webinar includes a 30 minute software demonstration and a Q&A session.
Get month names ordered using recursion
Learn how to pull the month names in a report drop down using a recursive common table expression (CTE).
The Consistency Debate
Steve Jones wonders today if data professionals get a little too hung up on the consistency issues between servers.
Steps to Rename a Subscriber Database for SQL Server Transactional Replication
I have transactional replication configured in production. The business team has a requirement to rename the subscription database. Is it possible to rename the subscription database and ensure that transactional replication will continue to function as before? If so, how could we achieve this?
Disaster Recovery: Rebuild system databases on SQL Server 2008 cluster
In this article we will see how to rebuild system databases in SQL Server 2008 cluster that is failed to restart.
SQL Server 2012 RTMs
This past week the big news in the SQL Server space was the release to manufacturing of SQL Server 2012.
Blogs
A New Word: los vidados
By Steve Jones
los vidados – n. the half-remembered acquaintances you knew years ago, who you might...
In-Person CISA Training – April 13-16, 2026
By Brian Kelley
I will be leading an in-person Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) exam prep class...
EightKB 2026
EightKB is back again for 2026! The biggest online SQL Server internals conference is...
Forums
query to track time spent on individual tasks in SSIS
Hi everyone I am looking at building a query to determine how much time...
SQL Server Transactional Replication from Always On Availability Groups to Azure SQL Database
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server Transactional Replication from...
Hidden Heroes
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Hidden Heroes
Question of the Day
Identities and Sequences I
When thinking of the Identity property for auto incrementing columns and sequences for the same action, which are explicitly linked to increment a number in a table when a new row is added?
See possible answers