First Normal Form
Learn the basics of first normal form and what that means to a database designer from Tom Thomson.
SQL Server Central Management Server Security
I have seen several tips on SQL Server Central Management Server and I want to implement the technology for my team. The only thing holding me back is security. Can you explain how security works with Central Management Server? What security access is needed to manage CMS? How about connecting to CMS? How about running a query using CMS? Check out this tip to answer these questions.
Changing the Oil In Your Server
Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren. We have regular maintenance that needs to be performed on our cars, and also regular maintenance that needs to be done on our servers. Andy points out that companies need to understand this and make sure these regular activities are performed.
Identify Local Administrators on a SQL Server box using PowerShell
I want to determine who the local administrators are on each of my SQL Servers. Basically, I'd like a nightly job to run against each of my SQL Servers and produce a list of admins for each server for my review. How can I do this?
Optimizing a cursor based routine – Part 2
In the second part of his optimization series, Dave Ballantyne shows us how to add conditional logic to set based, more efficient T-SQL code.
Tempdb Space Usage in SQL Server
We all know how important tempdb is and know that tempdb gets recreated every time SQL Server is restarted. Here we dig a little deeper to focus on how space is used inside tempdb.
Cost of the Cloud
The cloud should bring with it lower costs, and better efficiency, but that's not necessarily the way things are. Microsoft has a great internal project that costs out the cloud for their departments, and this would be a great addition to the public or private clouds.
Optimizing a cursor based routine – Part 1
Learn how you can remove a cursor and optimize a routine that loops through a series of data and performs various calculations in this short article from Dave Ballantyne.
Blogs
AI Helps Me with My Sloppiness
By Steve Jones
I type fairly well. Well, I type fast, but I do wear out a...
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...
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