On Being the 2009 Exceptional DBA
A guest editorial from Josef Richberg, winner of the Exceptional DBA contests in 2009.
There Must Be 15 Ways To Lose Your Cursors... part 1, Introduction
Learn how to leave those Cursors and loops in the thrash, Nash... An article from longtime contributor and SQL expert, Barry Young.
XML Workshop 26 – SELECT * FROM XML
This article presents a generic function that makes it easy to query XML documents
Determining Object Access Using SQL Server Profiler
Deanna Dicken examines a SQL Server Profiler event to determine object access...who is using the object, when, and how. This gives the SQL developer or database administrator much needed information for impact analysis prior to a change or the decommissioning of a SQL Server object.
Generating a Distinct Delimited List Using XML
Generating an ordered, distinct, delimited string using ROW_NUMBER() and FOR XML PATH.
The Breakfast Plan Goes Awry
A simple motivational plan goes sideways in this guest editorial from Andy Warren.
Performance Counter DMV sys.dm_os_performance_counters
By querying a single DMV, sys.dm_os_performance_counters to be precise, you can collect counter information that you would receive from PerfMon for the various SQL Server counters.
How the Resource Governor Helped Our Report Server
Trying to manage the load in a reporting server can be hard. Roy Ernest shows that Resource Governor might be a great solution that has worked in his environment.
Kudos to the Community
Steve Jones takes a day to thank everyone that donates their time to help others in the community.
The Great Forum Debate
Phil discusses the pros and cons of the traditional versus stack overflow-style model for forum debate, and wonders whether there is a database model that would support all these different forms of discussion, or cooperative work, so that we can simply fit the 'visualization' to the nature of the particular discussion.
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