SQLSkills Immersion training in London
A wrap up from MVP and expert Gail Shaw on her experiences of training with SQLskills.
Stairway to Data, Level 6: Types of Scales - Part II
Joe Celko introduces more powerful scales such as Interval, Log interval and ratio scales; before moving on to conversions, punctuation and units. Finally he gives guidelines as to how best to use scales in a database.
Time for a ROWID?
Steve Jones looks to the future of SQL Server and wonders if we ought to add a rowid to the internal structures.
System Monitor (Perfmon) Counters for SQL Server 2005
Capturing performance monitor counters is of great value to understand how SQL Server is behaving at a macro level, that being how overall resources are being used within the engine. Without this data it is difficult to determine where the performance issues are occurring. Capturing the metrics has been traditionally from Performance Monitor either on an ad-hoc basis or setting up a log to capture the values on a predefined basis.
NewSQL Can Save the World
A new breed of products use the relational model and address the scalability concerns of many RDBMSes. Today Steve Jones talks about NewSQL databases.
Speeding up database access Part 2 - Pinpointing Other Bottlenecks
Part 2 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.
Migrating Microsoft Access Databases to SQL Server 2008
Microsoft Access is a very good database solution, but it has limits. While the portability of mdb and accdb files is convenient, there are advantages to moving to the less portable SQL Server solution. If you do have SQL Server, there's very little reason not to consider migrating your Access Databases. Not all custom-made Access applications easily lend themselves to a SQL Server solution so you'll need to do some analysis before choosing a migration path.
How to create a CLR assembly on a remote server with limited permissions
How to create external_access CLR assembly on remote MS SQL server, when trustworthy option is forbidden, and only SQL login is available
Patches for SQL 10 and Techniques for SQL 11
Steve rounds up the patch news for SQL Server this week along with a look forward to the next version of the platform.
Blogs
Narrow Task Decomposition in AI Pipeline Agents
A nightly load into sales_fact fails. Ask an orchestrating agent to break down the...
Car Update: August 2026
By Steve Jones
It’s been some time since I provided a car update, so I decided to...
Microsoft Fabric OneLake Shortcuts: When to Use Them and When Not To
By James Serra
An architecture scenario Imagine separate Sales, Finance, Shared Data, and Executive Analytics workspaces. Sales...
Forums
Searching for my own posts
I have a really stupid question... Is there an easy way to search for...
How to Work with On-Premises AI Models to Generate T-SQL Code
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How to Work with On-Premises...
Escaping Strings
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Escaping Strings
Question of the Day
Escaping Strings
The STRING_ESCAPE() function requires 2 parameters in SQL Server 2025. The first is a string of text and the second is the type of escape rules being used. What are the options for the second parameter?
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