DMVs: are they worth the effort?
Many of the SQL Server DMVs still have a wild, unfinished feel but they are an incredibly useful tool for DBA, well-worth the sweat and toil required to learn and query them effectively.
Multi-Script, Multi-DB Deployments
A way to handle application releases involving multiple scripts and/or multiple databases.
Rating Bugs
How do you triage and rate the bugs that come in for software? How should Microsoft do this for SQL Server. Steve Jones has a few comments.
Tracy Hamlin elected Exceptional DBA of 2010
Congratulations to Tracy Hamlin, voted to be the Exceptional DBA of 2010.
TSQL Challenge 37 - Calculate the downtime and duration of servers bas
This is a challenge to identify the downtime of servers from the log data generated by a monitoring application.
How to execute a DOS command when xp_cmdshell is disabled
For security reasons many sites disable the extended stored procedure xp_cmdshell, which is used to run DOS commands or executables. When you really have to run a DOS command or an executable from a stored procedure how can you get around this limitation without a breakdown in security.
Linking to the Previous Row
One common problem in querying is to reference the previous row in a data set as part of a calculation. David McKinney brings us an interesting solution using SQL Server 2005.
Personal Investments
This Friday Steve Jones talks about your career, and training, and what you are doing about it.
Expert Analysis: A Case for Socialization of Data
It's time to integrate social data, enterprise analytics and enterprise data for better social-media strategy.
Beyond Automation
Are there some things that are beyond automation in your company? Steve Jones comments on the difficulty of changing things with automation in some cases.
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