Self-aware Instances
For this Friday's poll, Steve Jones talks about a fundamental architectural decision for your software. Do you want central control or a series of distributed processes, each one self-aware, and able to act on its own.
SQL Overview SSIS Package II - Retrieving SQL Error Log
In Part II of his series on monitoring SQL Servers, David Bird takes a look at importing data from your error logs.
How to develop TSQL Code
The basic texts for developing SQL code tend to leave unsaid the basic techniques for building routines such as stored procedures in TSQL. Phil Factor is well-known for his more lengthy and complex stored procedures, so we asked him to explain in more detail how he goes about developing things without the comfort of Visual Studio.
Measurements
"If you cannot measure something, you cannot improve it." - Lord Kelvin. That quote and a blog about it inspired today's editorial.
The RECOMPILE Options
This artcle attempts to differentiate between the uses of WITH RECOMPILE and OPTION (RECOMPILE) features.
Table Value Constructors in SQL Server 2008
Table Value Constructors (TVCs) are a useful feature of 2008, allowing you to specify tables of values and expressions. Users who are stuck with previous versions of SQL Server can play along, since Rob Sheldon demonstrates that there have always been ways of doing this in SQL Server, though less elegantly.
We Need a DBA Boot Camp
Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren. We often find that many DBAs fall into the job as accidental DBAs, and need more training. Is a boot camp the way to get them up to speed quickly?
Whether to use UNION or OR in SQL Server Queries
Recently I came across with an article on DB2 about using Union instead of OR. So I thought of carrying out a research on SQL Server on what scenarios UNION is optimal in and which scenarios OR would be best. I will analyze this with a few scenarios using samples taken from the AdventureWorks database
How Much Is It Worth?
This editorial was originally published on Nov 21, 2005. It is being re-run today as Steve is on holiday. How much money is it worth to compromise your ethics? Steve Jones asks today as many companies around the world seem to be doing that.
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