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.
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...
Blogs
AI Helps Me with My Sloppiness
By Steve Jones
I type fairly well. Well, I type fast, but I do wear out a...
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...
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