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.
SQLRally Call for Speakers Closes December 15, 2010
The call for speakers is open through December 15, 2010, and I hope many of you will take the chance...
Costing Cool Projects
Can you accurately determine the cost or benefit of a new, cool project up front? Steve Jones thinks not, but coming up with new projects can be a way to set yourself apart from others.
Blogs
Funny Money: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
While wandering around the documentation looking for some Question of the Day topics, I...
Why Database AI Agents need Layers?
By Arun Sirpal
Third part in my Ai series with databases. When building AI solutions within the...
Un-Migrating From the Cloud: T-SQL Tuesday #199
By Steve Jones
This month we have a very interesting invitation from Koen Verbeeck. He has hosted...
Forums
Backup Availability Group
Please I am hoping for some feedback Specifications: Windows Server 2022 SQL Server 2022...
How Do the Experts Become Experts?
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How Do the Experts Become...
Stairway to Reliable Database Deployments Level 4 – Preparing for Production Deployment
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Stairway to Reliable Database Deployments...
Question of the Day
Secure Communications
As of June 2026, what is the best version of TLS to use with SQL Server?
See possible answers