DBAs on ACID
Any DBA who has been bitten by these subtle data integrity issues, or reports that erratically produce the wrong results, will know how much careful testing is involved in mitigating them.
Real World Foreach Loop Container example
Describes different uses of the SSIS Foreach Loop container in one practical scenario.
The Value of Data
What value can you place on data? It can be hard to determine, especially when so many sites on the Internet want data to be free. However the New York Times is going to a subscription model, with the idea that there is some value to their data and people will pay for it.
TSQL Challenge 53 - Finding empty and non-empty intervals
A SQL Server instance is set up to log the session start time and end time into a table. Given this table, your job is to find all time intervals in which no one is logged in.
SQL Server Service Broker Poison Message Handling
Have you ever figured out why your Service Broker queue gets disabled automatically? What causes your Service Broker queue to get disabled in the first place? What is a poison message with respect to Service Broker? Is there anything new in SQL Server 2008 R2 for managing poison messages in Service Broker?
The DBAs Guide to Expectation Management
Your customers expectations are their primary measure of your success. How well are you managing them?
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Improving SQLServerCentral
Today Steve Jones talks about changes that are coming to SQLServerCentral.
Open Source SQL Server
There's a new product out that is an alternative to Microsoft SQL Server. The new HummyBase product from Kenneth Ingols SQL Software gives you another platform for your databases applications with no re-coding and at a fraction of the price.
Improving Comparison Operators and Window Functions
It is dangerous to assume that your data is sound. SQL already has intrinsic ways to cope with missing, or unknown data in its comparison predicate operators, or Theta operators. Can SQL be more effective in the way it deals with data quality? Joe Celko describes how the SQL Standard could soon evolve to deal with data in ways that allow aggregation and windowing in cases where the data quality is less than perfect.
What Counts for a DBA: Adventurousness
The ever changing nature of the relational database system requires administrators who relish risk and adventure. From the moment that Edgar F Codd proposed his 12 rules that defined the relational database management system, the language COBOL and the VSAM databases that had been so popular vanished as database administrators rushed to adopt the new system, keen as always to adopt the latest technologies, using hardware that had less power than the current middle school math student’s calculator: the relational era was born.
Blogs
Rolling Back a Broken Release
By Steve Jones
We had an interesting discussion about deployments in databases and how you go forward...
A bespoke reporting solution doesn’t have to cost the earth
By ChrisJenkins
You could be tolerating limited reporting because there isn’t an off the shelf solution...
Presenting with Visual Studio Code
A while back I wrote a quick post on setting up key mappings in...
Forums
Lots of FKs
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Lots of FKs
Real-time On-prem SQL Server Data in Excel – Over the Internet
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Real-time On-prem SQL Server Data...
Can You Let Go of Determinism
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Can You Let Go of...
Question of the Day
Lots of FKs
In SQL Server 2025, what are the most outgoing and incoming FK references a table can have?
See possible answers