More Support for Customers
A change in the support policy from Microsoft is a good thing, Steve Jones notes. Now you can still get help if you haven't been applying service packs.
New SQL Saturdays Coming
Quite a few new SQL Saturday events were announced recently in Louisville, Phoenix, and Raleigh.
Smart Virtualization
With so many people looking at virtualizing their environments, it's easy to assume it's easy to get done. Steve Jones, however, points out some advice from a very performance oriented company: the NYSE.
Light Weight Monitoring using Extended Events
Extended events provide DBAs with a new lightweight tool to monitor SQL Server performance.
TSQL Challenge 28 - SELECT TOP N articles from each category from a SQL Server 2000 database
The challenge is to write a query that returns the articles to be displayed in the home page of the website. N number of articles from each category is to be selected where N is configured in the Categories table. Each category should select the most recent N articles. ArticleID can be used to identify the most recent articles. An article with a higher number indicates a more recent article.
Clustered instance will not start after removing builtin admins
After removing the builtin administrators group the clustered services do not start. Perry Whittle walks through the issue and what you can do to correct things.
Company Rewards
Is there something that your company could do for you that would show that they valued your employment? That you were somehow important to them? Answer this Friday's poll.
Microsoft Access: Business Intelligence on a Shoestring
Learn how to deliver dynamic content by building a meaningful Business Intelligence Application, utilizing only what is available on the client's desktop, when a Data Warehouse BI Application, SQL Server and SSIS/SSRS aren't an option.
How to find unused Stored Procedures in SQL Server 2005/2008
Use dynamic PivotTables to identify unused Stored Procedures in a SQL Server 2005/2008 database
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