Most Work is Mundane
Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren. Work can seem mundane and tedious at times, and today Andy asks you you remain engaged when the work isn't exciting.
Preventing usage of "SELECT *..."
Is there a way to not allow users to use SELECT * in their queries? New author AJ Raghuram has an interesting solution that can prevent this in code.
SQL Server Data Mining with Microsoft Office Excel
This article demonstrates using SQL Server's data mining capabilities with the Excel.
SQL University: SQL Server Security Architecture - 3rd Party, Some Options
Day 3 of Security Week at SQL University is now in session. You're implementing a third party solution and you...
OldSQL
Support for SQL Server 2005 expires in April. Should you care? Steve Jones thinks it might not be a big deal for many people.
February 2011 Version of SQL Server 2005 and 2008 Diagnostic Information Queries
Wow, it is already February 2011, so here are the February 2011 versions of the SQL Server 2005 Diagnostic Information...
From Zero to SSIS in 5 Days
Learn Integration Services from SSIS expert and MVP, Andy Leonard in March. This 5 day class will be held on Mar 21-25, 2011 in Farmville, Virginia.
SQL Azure - Creating backups and copies of your databases
As a DBA you always followed a practice to back up your database (or take a snapshot of your database) before making any changes so that you can revert to your old database state if something goes wrong. Also to setup a development or test environment you use a backup of your database and restore it in the respective environment. If you are moving to SQL Azure, what would you do in these cases as backup / restore and database snapshots are not supported as of now?
Calling SQL Server With A BlackBerry Phone
An interesting tutorial for linking SQL Server to a Blackberry device and viewing images.
Stairway to SQL Server Reporting Services
A series from MVP Jessica Moss designed to help you understand Reporting Services and begin building reports.
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...
How We Handled a Vendor Retry That Loaded Twice in Snowflake
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How We Handled a Vendor...
Cognitive Coverage
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Cognitive Coverage
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