World Backup Day
This Saturday is World Backup Day, and with this in mind, Red Gate's Brian Harris talks about SQL Backup 7 and why they want to make backup verification a focus for more DBAs.
The Mechanical Turk
Today's editorial was originally published on Apr 17, 2007. It is being re-run as Steve is at SQL Server Connections. Today Steve talks about the Mechanical Turk process at Amazon.
A Variety of SQL Rally Pre-Cons
The 2012 SQL Rally is coming in May to Dallas, TX and there are a number of pre-conference sessions that can help you learn about something that interests you at an inexpensive price.
Get Back into SQL Server After You've Locked Yourself Out
Someone, while locking down the SQL Server, removed the permissions by which the DBAs came in and administered the server. As a result, we cannot get back into SQL Server. How can we restore our access to SQL Server? Check out this tip to find out.
Basics of XML and SQL Server, Part 4: Create an XML invoice with SSIS
This article demonstrates how to build an SSIS package that generates an XML invoice document from data stored in SQL Server and saves it to an XML file.
Is Computer Science Dead?
Today's editorial was originally published on Apr 27, 2007. It is being re-run as Steve is at SQL Server Connections. Today Steve talks programming.
SQL Server Indexing Best Practices: Stairway to SQL Server Indexes Level 15
Dos and don’ts that lead to a healthy, well-performing database.
Vendor Selection
Today's editorial was originally published on Apr 29, 2007. It is being re-run as Steve is at SQL Server Connections. Today Steve Jones talks about purchasing software.
Storing E-mail addresses more efficiently in SQL Server
A lot of people are storing large quantities of e-mail addresses in their systems. Since a large percentage of any system's user base is going to be supplying e-mail addresses from a few of the vastly popular providers (such as GMail and Hotmail), we are storing the "@gmail.com" and "@hotmail.com" parts of those addresses on disk over and over and over again.
Blogs
AI Helps Me with My Sloppiness
By Steve Jones
I type fairly well. Well, I type fast, but I do wear out a...
WITH clause gets a 26ai boost!
By way of background, a while back I did video called “My New Favourite...
Automatic Index Compaction
By ReviewMyDB
Index maintenance has always meant nightly jobs and a window you have to defend....
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...
How We Handled a Vendor Retry That Loaded Twice in Snowflake
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How We Handled a Vendor...
Cognitive Coverage
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Cognitive Coverage
Question of the Day
Getting the Average
I have this data in the dbo.Commission table in a SQL Server 2022 database.
salesperson commission Brian 12 Brian 16 Andy 7 Andy 14 Andy 21 Steve 20 Steve NULLAll the data is a varchar, and I decide to run this query to get the totals for each salesperson.
SELECT SalesPerson
, AVG(TRY_PARSE(Commission AS int)) AS TotalCommission
FROM commission
GROUP BY SalesPerson
GO
What average commission is calculated for Steve? See possible answers