Technical Article

3 SQL Join Concepts to Help You Choose the Right Join

What do SQL joins and the "teach a man to fish" Chinese proverb have in common? SQL joins, like regular expressions, are one of those commonplace programming tasks in which true success is entirely dependent upon your ability to conceptualize the outcome. Fail to do so and you'll likely wind up spending a few hours in a frustrating round of trial and error. Like regular expressions, the proliferation of online examples has actually contributed to the frustration, providing the equivalent of a day's worth of fish rather than the proverbial fishing pool.

Technical Article

Support for 15,000 Partitions in SQL Server 2008 SP2 and SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1

In SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2, the number of partitions on tables and indexes is limited to 1,000. This paper discusses how SQL Server 2008 SP2 and SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 address this limitation by providing an option to increase the limit to 15,000 partitions. It describes how support for 15,000 partitions can be enabled and disabled on a database. It also talks about performance characteristics, certain limitations associated with this support, known issues, and their workarounds. This support is targeted to enterprise customers and ISVs with large-scale decision support or data warehouse requirements.

External Article

REAL PRACTICES: Performance Scaling Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services at Microsoft adCenter

This white paper explains how Microsoft® adCenter implemented a Microsoft SQL Server® 2008 Analysis Services Scalable Shared Database on EMC® Symmetrix VMAX™ storage. Leveraging TimeFinder® clones and Enterprise Flash Drives with the read-only feature of SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services allowed adCenter to dramatically scale out OLAP while maintaining SLAs and decreasing system outages.

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Ethics

Today we have an editorial reprinted from April 3, 2006 as Steve is on vacation. Ethics are often just as bad at the top of our companies as they are at the bottom. Steve Jones comments today on how this affects IT.

Blogs

No Shortcuts for the SQLCMD Batch Terminator: #SQLNewBlogger

By

I was messing around with SQLCMD and I realized something I hadn’t known. I’ve...

Where Is My SQL Agent? Running Scheduled Jobs Against Azure SQL Database

By

One of the first things I review when I inherit a new SQL Server...

AgentDBA vs Critical SQL Server

By

It’s 07:43. Someone’s already left a message. “Something’s wrong with the DB server.” You...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

Increment a number in a SQL Query based on a value

By bswhipp

I have an issue where I have a Bill of Material list of items...

Follow Your Hunch

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Follow Your Hunch

What Happens When You Ask a Local AI to Query Your Database?

By Kumar Abhishek

Comments posted to this topic are about the item What Happens When You Ask...

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

Detecting Characters

I have a SQL Server 2022 English default installation on a server. I want to detect if there are any upper case characters in rows and I have this code: 

SELECT CustomerNameID,
       CustomerName
 FROM dbo.CustomerName
 WHERE CustomerName = LOWER(CustomerName)
Here is the sample data I am testing with: 
CustomerNameID CustomerName
1              John Smith
2              Sarah Johnson
3              MICHAEL WILLIAMS
4              JENNIFER BROWN
5              david jones
6              emily davis
7              Robert Miller
8              LISA WILSON
9              christopher moore
10             Amanda Taylor
How many rows are returned?

See possible answers