Where Do You Park?
Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren. Most people work in an office and need to commute, which brings with it the inevitable fight for parking in many companies. How is it handled for you?
Preventing Problems in SQL Server
It is never a good idea to let your users be the ones to tell you of database server outages. It is far better to be able to spot potential problems by being alerted for the most relevant conditions on your servers at the best threshold. This will take time and patience, but the reward will be an alerting system which allows you to deal more effectively with issues before they involve system down-time.
The Special Cloud
Amazon has built a cloud just for the US government. Will we see more specialized clouds in the future that might let us move some of our data to the cloud?
How to Performance Tune the Microsoft SQL Server tempdb Database
If your SQL Server’s tempdb database is heavily used by your application(s), consider locating it on an array of its own (such as RAID 1 or RAID 10). This will allow disk I/O to be more evenly distributed, reducing disk I/O contention issues, and speeding up SQL Server’s overall performance.
An Investment in Knowledge
Inspired by a quote from Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jones talks about investing in your career.
Raw Materials - The Little Engine that Could
Total Information Awareness can destroy your sanity. Get used to it.
Speeding up database access - part 4 Fixing expensive queries
Part 4 of a series from Matt Perdeck on speeding up your database access. This is a great series for developers. This is based on the book ASP.NET Site Performance Secrets.
Displaying Multiple Series on an SSRS Chart using Chart Area
A report might contain multiple data series on a chart, which can have considerably varying scales but common category groups. In such cases where this a big difference in scales, the data series with the lower scale can become obscured. In this tip we will take a look at how to solve this problem using Chart Areas.
A Look Back at Apple
With the resignation of Steve Jobs from Apple this week, Steve Jones looks back at his memories of the tech icon.
CONTEXT_INFO() and the SQL Calling Stack
Nothing new for many developers, but I still like the way you can maintain the stack throughout the call chain.
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