SQL Saturday #50 - East Iowa
Come to a SQL Saturday in Iowa City on Sept 18, 2010 and get a free day of training from the SQL community.
Check Twice, Update Once
An update to the Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer tool intrigues Steve Jones as it seems to have been enhanced to better help DBAs manage SQL Server.
Restricting SecurityAdmin on SQL Server 2005/2008
Members of the securityadmin role can escalate to sysadmin rights. Here's how to restrict them back to 2000 levels.
DMVs for Query Plan Metadata
Before you can tackle any performance issues with a working database, you need to know which queries to work on first: The ones that are taking the most time in total, and which are the most expensive in terms of cache, CPU and disk. Although SQL Server Management Studio can help, it isn't long before you need an armoury of DMVs to provide you the statistics to find the culprits.
How Old Are Your Database Statistics?
Unlike fine wine, database statistics do not improve with age. I recently helped out with a client who was having...
Parsing an ADO result set into a comma separated string in SSIS
This article describes a way to parse a result set in SSIS using For each loop container, variables and SQL task.
Where Are the Programmers?
Today Steve Jones has a little fun with titles in technology, and what we might start to call ourselves instead of DBAs.
What Every DBA Ought to Know About SQL Server Cursors (and Their Alternatives)
Cursors provide a means of processing through a set of records row-by-row. However, many companies have a policy against using cursors in their SQL Server standards. This article examines the problem with cursors and alternatives to using them.
Conditional WHERE Clauses and Boolean Algebra
Utilize simple boolean algebra and nullable parameters to implement conditional WHERE clauses without dynamic SQL.
Streaming Profiler Data Through StreamInsight
Using the Trace Management objects API it is possible to capture the events happening on SQL Server or indeed Analysis Services. I got to thinking that this would be a good thing to stream out in real time in StreamInsight and do some analysis “In Flight”. So here is a short video of me doing just that.
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