Clouds Are In our Future
Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren looking at the future of cloud computing and SQL Server.
How to check SQL Server Authentication Mode using T-SQL and SSMS
Many times developers want to put logic into their code or SSIS/DTS package to check the SQL Server authentication mode. How can this be done programmatically?
SQL Server Workload Types and Hardware Selection
There are two primary relational workload types that SQL Server commonly has to deal with, the first being Online Transaction...
Enjoying the New Year
For the last Friday poll of the year, Steve Jones has a fun one. Add your input and give everyone an idea of how to spend the last part of this holiday season.
Generating SQL Server Test Data with Visual Studio 2010
As a database developer or tester sometimes you need to have production like data in your environment for your development or testing, but you cannot have the production data because of security and privacy issues. So how you can generate test data or replicate similar data as in production for your development or test environment?
Getting a Dedicated Admin Connection
Did you know you can easily get a Dedicated Admin Connection (DAC) in SSMS? I didn’t assuming that I’d need...
The Year of the Community
Steve Jones looks back at 2010 and dubs it the year of the community. Join him for a look back at some events in the SQL Server world from 2010.
Improving 2D Range Query Performance in SQL Server
When using the BETWEEN operator on multiple columns, you are likely using a 2D range query. Such queries perform very poorly in SQL Server. This article examines rewriting these queries for improved performance.
PBM and PowerShell
The best new management feature added to SQL Server 2008 is Policy Based Management or PBM. PBM allows DBAs to...
Getting Started with Data Bars in SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services
I'm looking at several new visualization features in SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services and the data bar looks like something that I could really use. Can you provide an example of how to use this in a report?
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