Using the UPTIME Utility to Monitor Servers
Learn how to use a free utility to quickly monitor the uptime of your SQL Server instances.
Voting opens for Exceptional DBA of 2010
The voting for the 2010 Exceptional DBA opens today, and you can read about the finalists and prizes inside.
Making your SQL Server database changes backward compatible: Adding a new column
As multi-tier architectures grow over time, it is often challenging to coordinate those changes across the data, logic and presentation tiers. Unless planned and implemented carefully, an act as simple as adding a column to a table can grind all of the components of your application to a halt. While some of us have comfortable 12-hour maintenance windows every weekend, many of us are bound by service level agreements that are much more strict. So we must find ways to introduce fixes and new features with zero downtime, and without requiring every single component to be refactored at the same time.
Expert Systems – an SSRS Approach
An interesting approach to solving a complicated problem using SSRS. Users have too much documentation to read about a process, so Jonathan Spink introduces a better way to do things.
The Schema Debate
There was quite a bit of debate over the use of schemas recently on the Internet. Steve Jones talks about some of the reasons why you might want a schema, and a few reasons why you might not.
Creating XML in SQL Server
XML has become a common form of representing and exchanging data in today's information age. SQL Server introduced XML-centric capabilities in SQL Server 2000. That functionality has been expanded in later releases. One aspect of working with XML is creating XML from relational data, which is accomplished utilizing the FOR XML clause in SQL Server.
Making Your Career Go Further
Steve Jones comments on a few things that can help you, and are worth keeping in mind as you interact with people.
Moving to the Cloud
There has been a lot of talk about moving to cloud based computing, and cloud based services. Steve Jones comments on what this might mean today.
Using Certificates to Sign Stored Procedures
How to sign stored procedures with certificates, this is useful if the procedures use dynamic SQL.
Configure Windows Firewall for SQL Server 2008 Integration Services in Windows Server 2008 R2
I have installed SQL Server 2008 on Windows Server 2008 R2 and I am unable to connect to SQL Server 2008 Integration Services Instance from SQL Server 2008 Management Studio which is installed on another remote server. As I am new to Windows Server 2008 R2 it would be great if you can let me know the step by step approach to enable the default port of SQL Server 2008 Integration Services in Windows Firewall for user connectivity.
Blogs
AI Helps Me with My Sloppiness
By Steve Jones
I type fairly well. Well, I type fast, but I do wear out a...
WITH clause gets a 26ai boost!
By way of background, a while back I did video called “My New Favourite...
Automatic Index Compaction
By ReviewMyDB
Index maintenance has always meant nightly jobs and a window you have to defend....
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