Excel in the Clouds
Today Steve Jones talks about a new use for cloud computing with Excel to analyze large sets of data.
SQL Peer-to-Peer Dynamic Structured Data Processing Collaboration
Unstructured and XML semi-structured data is now used more than structured data. But fixed structured data still keeps businesses running day in and day out, which requires consistent predictable highly principled processing for correct results. For this reason, it would be very useful to have a general purpose SQL peer-to-peer collaboration capability that can utilize highly principled hierarchical data processing and its flexible and advanced structured processing to support dynamically structured data and its dynamic structured processing. This flexible dynamic structured processing can change the structure of the data as necessary for the required processing while preserving the relational and hierarchical data principles. This processing will perform freely across remote unrelated peer locations anytime and transparently process unpredictable and unknown structured data and data type changes automatically for immediate processing using automatic metadata maintenance.
Archiving
It seems that archival isn't on the mind of most designers when they first build a database, which is OK, but DBAs ought to be building skills to implement this if the data size grows large.
Patch Week
This week Steve Jones notes there were quite a few patches from Microsoft for a variety of products. No SQL Server specific security patches, but that doesn't mean that DBAs shouldn't be patching systems.
Slowly changing dimensions using T-SQL MERGE
Of all the technical solutions to the problem of slowly changing dimensions, the T-SQL MERGE statement is one of the most elegant.
A Tale of Identifiers
Identifiers aren't locators, and they aren't pointers or links either. They are a logical concept in a relational database, and, unlike the more traditional methods of accessing data, don't derive from the way that data gets stored. Identifiers uniquely identify members of the set, and it should be possible to validate and verify them. Celko somehow involves watches and taxi cabs to illustrate the point.
SQL Saturday #82 - Indianapolis
Come to Indianapolis on June 25, 2011 for a free one day training event on SQL Server.
Multiple Failures
This Friday Steve Jones has a disaster recovery poll. When you have a true disaster, often there are multiple things that go wrong and cause a cascading failure. Is this common, let us know what your experience is this Friday.
SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 Integration Services - Consuming Web Services Using Script Task
Web services can be easily leveraged in SQL Server 2008 R2 Integration Services by employing Web Services Task.
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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