As each year goes by the uptime requirement for our databases gets larger and larger, meaning the downtime that we have to do maintenance on our databases is getting smaller and smaller. This tip will look at a feature that was introduced in SQL Server 2005 that allows us to leave our indexes online and accessible while they are being rebuilt.
Continuous improvement comes from measurement, analysis, and changes. Steve Jones talks about how we should be doing that with our data collection, analysis, and storage.
This article has a T-SQL function to detect the SQL Agent job state.
In general XML documents or fragments are held in strings as text markup. In SQL Server, XML variables and columns are instead tokenised to allow rapid access to the data within. This is fine, but can cause some odd problems, such as ' entitization'. What do you do if you need to preserve the formatting? As usual Rob Sheldon comes to our aid.
The TSQL aggregate function SUM() gives a number based on the addition of the values of multiple rows to each other. Do the same thing but with multiplication instead of addition.
The biggest security threat always seems to come from insiders and today Steve Jones talks about the need to monitor your environment.
It seems inevitable that many customers will end up paying more to get the same features they have today, under the new SQL Server licencing model, unless they respond to Microsoft's creativity with some of their own.
The challenge is to find the Episode and Sequence based on interval.
One of the more popular counters used by DBAs to monitor SQL Server performance, the Buffer Cache Hit Ratio, is useless as a predictor of imminent performance problems. Worse, it can be misleading. Jonathan Kehayias demonstrates this convincingly with some simple tests.
By ChrisJenkins
Do you spend so long manipulating your data into something vaguely useful that you...
By Steve Jones
It was neat to stumble on this in the book, a piece by me,...
Forgive me for the title. Mentally I’m 12. When I started my current day...
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In SQL Server 2025, what is returned by this code:
SELECT EDIT_DISTANCE('Steve', 'Stan')
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