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.
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....
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.
Today we have an editorial reprinted from Jan 15, 2006 as Steve is on vacation. This one talks about the patching process at Microsoft, and why it sometimes is slower than we might like.
How the JOIN operator works, the different types of JOINs and relevant information about joining tables.
Probably not the kind of change you're expecting. I've recently been contacted by the Kimball Group, and they've asked me...
You need to provide data validation at the server level for complex strings like phone numbers, email addresses, etc. You may also need to do data cleanup / standardization before moving it from source to target. Although SQL Server provides a fair number of string functions, the code developed with these built-in functions can become complex and hard to maintain or reuse.
What happens when you have bad IT people working in your company? Steve Jones says that they always will be around, but we might not want to enable them to continue in this business when we find them.
This article provides a practical example of minimizing the growth of a distribution database.
Depending on your anticipated workload and which SQL Server components you have installed, there are a number of instance level...
By Arun Sirpal
Third part in my Ai series with databases. When building AI solutions within the...
By Steve Jones
This month we have a very interesting invitation from Koen Verbeeck. He has hosted...
It’s the second tuesday of the month, which means T-SQL Tuesday time! This month’s...
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As of June 2026, what is the best version of TLS to use with SQL Server?
See possible answers