What’s Going on with SQL Server Service Account Changes?
For years we’ve been told you should use Enterprise Manager in SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server Configuration Manager in...
Hierarchies in SQL
One very common structure that needs to be handled in T-SQL is the hierarchy. One of our prominent members of the community discusses how you can handle hierarchies in SQL Server.
Put Your Thinking Caps On
Three contests from Red Gate Software are coming next week. Get a hint about what might be coming and set a reminder on your calendar.
Shrinking Databases
One piece of advice that is often given to new SQL Server administrators is not to shrink their databases. But they seem to do it often enough anyway. For this Friday's poll, Steve Jones asks if we should do away with shrink.
Facebook and E-Mail Security for a New Teenager
Cross-posted from a Goal Keeping DBA blog:
Just recently, my oldest son entered the ranks of the teenagers. I shouldn’t actually...
Giving Back, SQLMeetings.com Is Going Live Soon
I’ve been pretty quite since the PASS Summit and with good reason. Every year we have a chapter leader meeting....
Understanding and Controlling Parallel Query Processing in SQL Server
Data warehousing and general reporting applications tend to be CPU intensive because they need to read and process a large number of rows. To facilitate quick data processing for queries that touch a large amount of data, Microsoft SQL Server exploits the power of multiple logical processors to provide parallel query processing operations such as parallel scans. Through extensive testing, we have learned that, for most large queries that are executed in a parallel fashion, SQL Server can deliver linear or nearly linear response time speedup as the number of logical processors increases. However, some queries in high parallelism scenarios perform suboptimally. There are also some parallelism issues that can occur in a multi-user parallel query workload. This white paper describes parallel performance problems you might encounter when you run such queries and workloads, and it explains why these issues occur. In addition, it presents how data warehouse developers can detect these issues, and how they can work around them or mitigate them.
Certified Private Clouds
Microsoft is working to certify vendors to build private clouds, which Steve Jones thinks is a great idea.
What's Happening Here?
A look at what's happening with the SQLServerCentral servers based on the public information exposed by SQL Monitor.
Denormalization in SQL Server for Fun and Profit
Normalization is standard practice in database design, however, an over-normalized database can have issues. This article examines the case for denormalization.
Blogs
Using Prompt AI for a Travel Data Analysis
By Steve Jones
I was looking back at my year and decided to see if SQL Prompt...
FinOps for Kubernetes: Leveraging OpenCost, KubeGreen, and Kubecost for Cost Efficiency
In the era of cloud-native applications, Kubernetes has become the default standard platform for...
2025 Wrapped for Steve
By Steve Jones
I’ve often done some analysis of my year in different ways. Last year I...
Forums
The North Star for the Year
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The North Star for the...
Multiple Escape Characters
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Multiple Escape Characters
reaching ftp thru winscp but erroring in ssis ftp task connection
Hi, below i show various results trying to reach our ftp site (a globalscape...
Question of the Day
Multiple Escape Characters
In SQL Server 2025, I run this code (in a database with the appropriate collation):
SELECT UNISTR('%*3041%*308A%*304C%*3068 and good night', '%*') AS 'A Classic';
What is returned? See possible answers