Thinking Time
Do you get time to stop and think, without being pressured to solve a specific problem? Steve Jones notes that it's important to get that creative time to grow and produce better work.
7 Preventable Backup Errors
The loss of a company's data is often enough to put the company out of business; and yet backup errors are generally avoidable with the application of common sense rather than deep technical knowledge. Grant digs into memories of his long experience of giving forum advice, to come up with the most easily preventable backup errors.
Little Love Lost for SMO
SMO is a very useful way of automating a wide range of routine database jobs, but Phil Factor laments Microsoft's apparent ambivalence towards the technology, including a lack of anything remotely resembling adequate documentation.
Stress – It’s Not Fair
Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren that looks at stress and how it impacts your job. He offers a few ways that you might better deal with it as well.
TSQL Challenge 70 - Find the longest sequence of alphabets in a string
This challenge invites you to identify the longest sequence of alphabets from a string.
Data Mining Model Training Destination in SQL Server Integration Services
How to incorporate data mining directly into the Data Flow of SQL Server 2008 R2 Integration Services-based packages.
A VB.NET toolkit for writing SSIS Script Tasks
This article demonstrates basic VB.NET code that will enable SSIS package developers to write useful custom SSIS script tasks.
Snack Attack
This editorial was originally published on Jan 11, 2007 and is being re-run as Steve is on vacation. A fun poll today asking what you like to eat at work.
SQL Server stored procedure to generate random passwords
SQL Server is used to support many applications and one such feature of most applications is the storage of passwords. Sometimes there is a need to reset a password using a temporary password or generate a random password for a new user. In this tip I cover a simple stored procedure to generate random passwords that can be incorporated into your applications.
Blogs
Automatic Index Compaction
By ReviewMyDB
Index maintenance has always meant nightly jobs and a window you have to defend....
The Goldilocks problem – Materialized Views
I’m sure you’ve all heard the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but...
Monday Monitor Tips: Virtual Machine Usage and Cost
By Steve Jones
One of the things I’ve been requesting for a number of years is cost...
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