SQLServerCentral Editorial

The Wisdom Department

Steve Jones talks about the way business ought to run, with more long term goals and objectives taking precedence over short term revenue. One idea that might help us is having a wisdom department that looks forward and tries to grow the business for the long term.

Technical Article

Slow in the Application, Fast in SSMS? Understanding Performance Mysteries

When I read various forums about SQL Server, I frequently see questions from deeply mystified posters. They have identified a slow query or stored procedure in their application. They cull the SQL batch from the application and run it in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to analyse it, only to find that the response is instantaneous. At this point they are inclined to think that SQL Server is all about magic. A similar mystery is when a developer has extracted a query in his stored procedure to run it stand-alone only to find that it runs much faster – or much slower – than inside the procedure.

SQLServerCentral Article

Concatenating Rows

Often in database design we store different values in rows to take advantage of a normalized design. However many times we need to combine multiple rows of data into one row for a report of some sort. New author Carl P. Anderson brings us some interesting T-SQL code to accomplish this.

SQLServerCentral Editorial

SLA Contracts

This Friday Steve Jones talks about the commitments and contracts that you may have with your customers. Do you know what they are? Is the contract explicitly spelled out? Take this Friday's poll and share your answer with everyone else.

External Article

Look-up Tables in SQL

Lookup tables can be a force for good in a relational database. Whereas the 'One True Lookup Table' remains a classic of bad database design, an auxiliary table that holds static data, and is used to lookup values, still has powerful magic. Joe Celko explains....

Technical Article

T-SQL Quiz 2011

The 2011 edition of MVP Jacob Sebastian's T-SQL Quiz is underway. You can take part in the quiz each day, submitting your answers for the chance to show off your knowledge and perhaps win some prizes.

Blogs

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Forums

how to write this query?

By water490

Hi everyone I asked this earlier but the desired outcome is a bit different...

Windows logins for users migrated from DomainA to DomainB

By a.koopman

Hi, I have a SQL Server instance where users connect to via Windows Authentication,...

Multiple Deployment Processes

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Multiple Deployment Processes

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Question of the Day

Upgrading Admin Queries

I have a query from a former DBA that we run on SQL Server 2025 to check on database metadata. This query references sys.sysaltfiles. I want to refactor this code to be more modern. Which DMV should I reference instead?  

See possible answers