The Half Day Experiment
A change at the PASS Summit this year has Steve Jones watching to see if it works out well for attendees and speakers.
Enabling Drillthrough in Analysis Services
Data analysis from a cube starts with aggregated and summarized data, followed by drill-down and drill-through of the data for a deeper and intelligent analysis. Drill down is inherently supported when you browse the data of the cube, but drill through has to be defined as per the requirements of analysis. In this tip we will see how to enable drill through on a cube.
A Nice Refund
This editorial was originally published on Sept 12, 2006. The IRS makes a $318mm mistake and Steve talks about the need to ensure that you don't do something similar.
Holy Foreign Keys and Indexes
This article shows an interesting issue with foreign keys and how they are aligned with the base tables in SQL 2005 SP 4.
A Performance Troubleshooting Methodology for SQL Server
When healing a sick SQL Server, you must forget the idea that there could ever be a simple correspondence between symptom and disease: The art of troubleshooting is much more the art of discovering, and assembling, the various pieces of the puzzle so that you have a complete understanding of what is going on inside of a server.
Stairway to T-SQL DML Level 1: The Basic SELECT Statement
There are lots of different aspects of managing data in a SQL Server database. Before you can get into the complex management issues associated with managing application data you need to start with the basic of retrieving data from a table. To return data from a SQL Server table you use a SELECT statement. In this level I will be cover the components of the basic SELECT statement and how you can use it to retrieve data from a single SQL Server table.
The 2011 SQLServerCentral Party at the PASS Summit
Once again SQLServerCentral is hosting a party at the PASS Summit in Seattle on Oct 11 at the Washington State Convention Center. Read about how you can get tickets.
The DR Test Schedule
Planning for disaster recovery entails a lot of different items, but testing is an important one. If you don't test your plans, you can't be sure they will work. This Friday Steve Jones asks how often your test.
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