Unit Testing Myths and Practices
We all understand the value of Unit Testing, but how come so few organisations maintain unit tests for their in-house applications? We can no longer pretend that unit testing is a universal panacea for ensuring less-buggy applications. Instead, we should be prepared to actively justify the use of unit tests, and be more savvy about where in the development cycle the unit test resources should be most effectively used.
An Implementation of the FNV1a Hash Algorithm for SQL Server
Three CLR-resident functions for 16-, 32-, and 64-bit FNV1a hashing
Putting JSON on an equal footing to XML
In SQL Server, we treat XML with a reverence that is disproportionate to its importance. The SQL Server team have indeed gone big on XML, as Michael Cole’s book reveals. The industry has gone big in another direction: JSON.
TSQL Challenge 76 - Identify the sequence of accounting transactions
The challenge is to identify the sequence of accounting transactions.
How to Kill a Company in One Step or Save it in Three
The majority of companies that suffer a major data loss subsequently go out of business. Wesley David remembers vividly the day when the organisation he worked for found that they couldn't restore their data, and the subsequent struggles that ensued. Shoulda-woulda-coulda.
SQL Saturday #108 - Redmond
Come to a free day of SQL Server training on Feb 25, 2012 in Redmond, WA.
Create, Alter, and Drop Indexes: Stairway to SQL Server Indexes Level 12
Options and impacts when creating, altering and dropping an index
Programmers v Salespeople
This Friday Steve Jones asks whether you think the salespeople or the technical people are more important to the success of a company. And if they should be better compensated.
Blogs
Advice I Like: Respect
By Steve Jones
“Don’t aim to have others like you; aim to have them respect you.” –...
Blue Sky Programming – The Optimism Trap
Many years ago, before I joined Oracle, I was working on a major modernisation...
Setting Up a Mac for Data Engineering and AI Work
If you work with data pipelines, SQL, notebooks, or machine learning models, a Mac...
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...
locking down agent for new user on our dev machine
hi , a new user wants to be able to add sql agent jobs...
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