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.
Convert Mirroring to Log Shipping
Describes how to convert database mirroring to log shipping in SQL 2005/2008.
Additional Columns in StreamInsight Event Flow Debugger
This tool is excellent when investigating what is going on in your StreamInsight Streams. I was looking through the menu items recently and went to Query => Event Fields I found that there were a couple of columns not added by default to the event viewer (Reminds me of the fact that the Variables viewer in SSIS hides columns also) Latency NewEndTime EnqueueTime Here they all are together. This gives us even more information about what is going on
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
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...
Secure Communications
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Secure Communications
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