Which Bugs Do You Find?
This Friday Steve Jones wonders what types of bugs you find in software. Are there more prevalent because of design or coding?
NewSQL: The Relational Model Meets Distributed Architectures
Research firm The 451 Group coins "NewSQL" to categorize a new breed of database designed for distributed environments -- like the cloud.
SQL Server Blocking Monitoring
Monitoring blocking can be problematic when you cannot catch it in the act. This article will show you an easy way to configure a SQL Server Profiler Trace to monitor blocking
The Three Percent Difference
Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren. Most people get an annual review that determines what their salary change might be for the next year. Does 3% make a difference? Andy Warren asks the question today.
Scaling Up Your Data Warehouse with SQL Server 2008 R2
SQL Server 2008 introduced many new functional and performance improvements for data warehousing, and SQL Server 2008 R2 includes all these and more. This paper discusses how to use SQL Server 2008 R2 to get great performance as your data warehouse scales up. We present lessons learned during extensive internal data warehouse testing on a 64-core HP Integrity Superdome during the development of the SQL Server 2008 release, and via production experience with large-scale SQL Server customers. Our testing indicates that many customers can expect their performance to nearly double on the same hardware they are currently using, merely by upgrading to SQL Server 2008 R2 from SQL Server 2005 or earlier, and compressing their fact tables. We cover techniques to improve manageability and performance at high-scale, encompassing data loading (extract, transform, load), query processing, partitioning, index maintenance, indexed view (aggregate) management, and backup and restore.
Stairway to Data, Level 2: Numerics
A confusion about the nature of numbers can lead to a number of problems in database applications. Joe Celko gives a simple guide to the subject
Stalking the Bad Guys
What do yo do if you find malicious code in your system? Delete it? Steve Jones suggests that a honeypot might be a better idea.
Database Management for SharePoint 2010
With each revision, SharePoint becomes more a SQL Server Database application, with everything that implies for planning and deployment. There are advantages to this: SharePoint can make use of mirroring, data-compression and remote BLOB storage. It can employ advanced tools such as data file compression, and object-level restore. DBAs can employ familiar techniques to speed SharePoint applications. Bert explains the way that SharePoint and SQL Server interact.
Asynchronous Procesing with Service Broker
Service Broker is a great feature that allows you to defer processing in SQL Server. Learn how you can have processes work together, but in an asynchronous fashion in this piece from Gary Strange.
Working Long or Working Hard?
Would you rather work longer hours or tackle harder work? Steve Jones comments today on a recent post by Seth Godin. The answer as to what most people prefer might surprise you.
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
Managing Incidents and Fighting Fires
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Backing Up a DMK
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The Quiet Part
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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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