Test Before Deciding
How do you decide what improvements to make to your SQL Server? Or what settings to turn off? Having hard and fast rules isn't a great idea, and Steve Jones talks about why.
TSQL Challenge 52: Recursive Wage Calculation in a Parent-Child dimens
This challenge is intended to calculate company's wage spent below a top level manager.
ANSI Connection Settings
It’s reasonably well known that you can get different execution plans if you change the ANSI connection settings. But the...
SQL Server Service Broker - External Activation
SQL Server Service Broker allows for two types of messaging activation, Internal Activation or External Activation. In this article we discuss External Activation.
Looking at SOX
This Friday Steve Jones asks what impact the Sarbanes-Oxley act has had on your job. After nearly a decade since the act was passed, is it intrusive in the workplace or just another part of your job.
Mouse Clicks, Reactive Extensions and StreamInsight Mashup
I had an hour spare this afternoon so I wanted to have another play with Reactive Extensions in .Net and StreamInsight. I also didn’t want to simply use a console window as a way of gathering events so I decided to use a windows form instead. The task I set myself was this. Whenever I click on my form I want to subscribe to the event and output its location to the console window and also the timestamp of the event.
SQLskills Immersion Events - Deep SQL Server Training!
SQLskills is offering a number of intense SQL Server training events later this year. A new class has been added in Chicago in May along with a London event in June.
Stored Procedure Definitions and Permissions
I wrote a post a while back that showed how you can grant execute permission ‘carte blanche’ for a database...
What a week for our first Immersion Event on Internals and Performance
A short writeup on the first Immersion Event from SQLskills, a week long class designed to bring real world skills to DBAs and developers that want to become highly skilled SQL Server professionals.
Implicit and Explicit Conversions
Code that depends on implicit conversions can live for years in production without issue. However Steve Jones says that you shouldn't depend on these conversions
Blogs
Automatic Index Compaction
By ReviewMyDB
Index maintenance has always meant nightly jobs and a window you have to defend....
The Goldilocks problem – Materialized Views
I’m sure you’ve all heard the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but...
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...
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
Getting the Average
I have this data in the dbo.Commission table in a SQL Server 2022 database.
salesperson commission Brian 12 Brian 16 Andy 7 Andy 14 Andy 21 Steve 20 Steve NULLAll the data is a varchar, and I decide to run this query to get the totals for each salesperson.
SELECT SalesPerson
, AVG(TRY_PARSE(Commission AS int)) AS TotalCommission
FROM commission
GROUP BY SalesPerson
GO
What average commission is calculated for Steve? See possible answers