The Mentoring Experiment
Have you ever wanted a mentor? Do you think that your career would benefit from having one? Steve Jones talks about a new experiment that he is putting in place with Andy Warren that looks to build a mentoring framework.
Database Normalization Webcast
Join Normalization nut Thomas LeBlanc for a review of a standard operating procedure used among DBAs at an employer. See the changes he made after joining the BI group at this employer. The session will go through naming conventions, check list for creating a table, formatting in stored procedures, and more. A brief preview of the SQLRally talk 3rd Normal Form: That’s Crazy Talk!!! Will be given about Lookup tables. Thur, Apr 21, 2011, 12:00pm EST.
Implementing Database Settings Using Policy Based Management
This article demonstrates how a DBA can check for policy compliance by leveraging the Policy Based Management Feature of SQL Server.
Careful Blogging
This editorial was originally published on Sept 22, 2005. Steve Jones talks about the dangers of blogging about your job and with your company. Be sure that you are aware of what the impact of your posts will be on your image.
Performance Troubleshooting with Windows Resource Monitor
Windows Resource Monitor can be a very useful tool for initial diagnosis of performance issues. In this two part series we look at how to troubleshoot performance issues using Resource Monitor.
Webinar: Business Intelligence Development using SQL Developer Tools
This webinar, presented by Noemi Moreno, BI Developer at Red Gate Software, will consist of a 30 minute software demonstration followed by Q&A. You will see SQL Developer tools in action, and how they can simplify and enhance your Business Intelligence applications. This takes place on Apr 19, 2011 from 4pm-5pm GMT.
Analytics or Flying Cars
We live in a great age of data and Steve Jones thinks it's a great time to be a data professional, especially if you work on your data presentation skills.
Do we do enough?
Do we, event organizers, tool vendors, concerned SQL citizens, as a community, do enough to reach people who don't know about the training available to them?
TSQL Challenge 54 - Find the longest matching area code
Your job is to write a query that identifies the longest matching country/area code from each phone number based on the information stored in an area-code reference table.
Clean unused space when a variable-length column is dropped from a SQL Server table or indexed view
Whenever rows or columns are deleted from a table, SQL Server reuses space to accommodate new data. However, this is not the case when a variable length column is deleted. The space used by this type of column is not reclaimed automatically. Variable length columns can be of data types varchar, nvarchar, varchar(max), nvarchar(max), varbinary, varbinary(max), text, ntext, image, sql_variant, and xml. In this tip, I have tried to put forth a solution to reclaim this space and this should work for SQL 2005 and later versions.
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