Cursors for T-SQL Beginners
Should we really avoid cursors? See how to rewrite code to avoid cursors and also analyze the implications.
The Backup Passwords
Today Steve Jones asks how you handle those passwords across time for backups in this week's Friday poll.
Onboarding SQL Server Private Cloud Environment
This guide outlines the major considerations that must be taken into account when onboarding Microsoft® SQL Server® environments into a private cloud infrastructure.There is a strong trend in IT to virtualize servers whenever possible, driven by:1. Standardization2. Manageability3. IT agility and efficiency4. Consolidating servers reduces hardware, energy, and datacenter space utilization costs5. Virtualized environments allow new Disaster Recovery strategiesThe Hyper-V™ role in Windows Server® 2008 R2 provides a robust and cost-effective virtualization foundation to deliver these scenarios.However, there is significant risk in virtualizing SQL Server environments without giving careful consideration to the workloads being virtualized and the requirements of the server applications running on a Hyper-V environment.
Getting the most out of your SQL Server 2008 Cluster
Gain an insight into how to use your SQL Server cluster for more than just high availibility in this article from Mark Jones.
Greed Is Good (for IT)
Can greedy executives be good for IT? Steve Jones thinks so and gives us a few reasons today.
SQL Server Index Maintenance Performance Tuning for Large Tables
This article describes a real-world example of performance tuning index maintenance for a large table of approximately 1 billion rows.
Nominations open for Exceptional DBA of 2011
The Exceptional DBA contest is running again in 2011 and nominations are now open. Please submit yourself or a colleague for a chance to win some great prizes and be recognized as an amazing data professional.
Treat People Like People
Steve Jones thinks that the Millennials have the right approach to work. There are many things that are more important than money.
TIME Gentlemen please! The SQL Server temporal datatypes
If you are still using the old Sybase DateTime datatype, it is a good idea to move your code to the more standard datatypes that were introduced in SQL Server 2008. Joe Celko explains why, and walks through some of the history of the TSQL way of storing and manipulating dates and times.
Parsing Log Files and Summarizing Results with PowerShell
This article takes a look at how PowerShell can speed up the process of parsing large log files.
Blogs
Learn Better: Pause to Review More
By Brian Kelley
If you want to learn better, pause more in your learning to intentionally review.
Azure SQL Managed Instance Next-Gen: Bring on the IOPS
By John
If you’ve used Azure SQL Managed Instance General Purpose, you know the drill: to...
SQL, MDX, DAX – the languages of data
By DataOnWheels
Ramblings of a retired data architect Let me start by saying that I have...
Forums
Two foreign keys to the same table. Can't cascade deletes.
Not sure if this is really a relational theory question but it seems about...
Connecting Power BI to SSAS and effective user not working
Hi everyone, Below is a consolidated summary of what we validated Architecture & data...
High Availability setup - has anyone seen this method?
Hi all, I recently moved to a new employer who have their HA setup...
Question of the Day
Encoding URLs
I have this data in a SQL Server 2025 table:
CREATE TABLE Response ( ResponseID INT NOT NULL CONSTRAINT ResponsePK PRIMARY KEY , ResponseVal VARBINARY(5000) ) GOIf I want to get a value from this table that I can add to a URL in a browser, which of these code items produces a result I can use? See possible answers