How to Deal with the Stresses and Anxieties in Today's IT Industry
Today we have a guest editorial from Stanley Popovich that talks about dealing with stress at work.
Patch Week
With SQL Server releasing new cumulative updates this week, Steve Jones talks about the patching strategy of SQL Server.
SSRS Reports Performance Debugging and Analysis
SSRS provides a very user friendly way to author and deploy reports. These reports can be accessed from different platforms where the reports are deployed - reports manager, SharePoint, stand-alone / distributed applications or programmatically using SSRS SOAP endpoints. Unfortunately, SSRS / BIDS does not provide any high-end debugging tools such as SQL Profiler for analyzing the performance of SSRS reports. In this tip we will look at different ways of debugging and analyzing SSRS reports performance using execution logs and freeware tools.
Statistics, row estimations and the ascending date column
SQL’s auto-updating statistics go a fair way to making SQL Server a self-tuning database engine and in many cases they...
The default trace in SQL Server - the power of performance and security auditing
Since the introduction of SQL Server 2005, there is a simple lightweight trace that is left running by default on every SQL Server. This provides some very valuable information for the DBA about the running server, but it isn't well-documented. Feodor Georgiev reveals many of the secrets of this facility and shows how to get reports from it.
What Differentiates Enterprise?
This Friday Steve Jones asks you about the Enterprise Edition of SQL Server, and what should the distinction be?
SQL Server 2008 Service Broker - Conversation Priorities
SQL Server 2008 Service Broker lets you process higher priority messages and conversations earlier than those with lower priority.
SQL Server Startup
From time to time I see a question asking how to determine the last time a SQL Server was either...
Do You Need A Safe Word?
A hacker breaches security by gaining control of an executive's email account. Does that mean that we should consider adding another level of authentication to privileged requests?
SQL Server random numerics data generation using CLR
You need to generate random data directly into SQL Server table columns or close to the database engine as variables or expressions. Looking at the SQL Server available functions, you notice that only RAND function offers support for random data generation. Although RAND([seed]) is a built-in function, it can only return a float value between 0 and 1, and has other limitations in regards to seed values. Because your table columns may be of various data types, and each data type may have a lower value and an upper value, you would prefer to create your custom random data generators. This is when SQL Server CLR functions come into play and provide a viable solution.
Blogs
Monday Monitor Tips: Virtual Machine Usage and Cost
By Steve Jones
One of the things I’ve been requesting for a number of years is cost...
Advice I Like: Respect
By Steve Jones
“Don’t aim to have others like you; aim to have them respect you.” –...
Blue Sky Programming – The Optimism Trap
Many years ago, before I joined Oracle, I was working on a major modernisation...
Forums
SQL Art, Part 4: Happy 4th of July — A British DBA's Guide to Celebrating a War We Don't Talk About
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Art, Part 4: Happy...
SQL Server Still Wins
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server Still Wins
DBCC CHECKDB Limits I
Comments posted to this topic are about the item DBCC CHECKDB Limits I
Question of the Day
DBCC CHECKDB Limits I
When running DBCC CHECKDB on SQL Server 2025, can I include the Resource Database?
See possible answers