President's Day 2010
A holiday in the US has Steve Jones on the slopes. A short reminder of patches released last week is the editorial today.
The Community Has Been Heard
Steve Jones talked about the announcements of Service Pack 4 for SQL Server 2005 and Service Pack 2 for SQL Server 2008 in this editorial.
Webinar Series: SQL Server 101
A partnership with Pragmatic Works brings you some basic SQL Server training through a series of webinars.
Use SSIS to import one cell of an Excel file into SQL Server
Recently I needed to find a method to import one cell of an Excel sheet into SQL Server 2005 using a scheduled job on a 64 bit clustered environment. For example, I have a monthly sales report listing sales per product category, such as Books, Magazines, DVDs, etc. I only want to import the Total Sales amount into SQL Server and this number is located in an Excel file "sales.xls.sheet1.cell.B5". I used to use OPENROWSET to solve the problem, however OPENROWSET requires Microsoft Jet OLE DB Provider which is not available in 64 bit. In this tip I am going to talk about how to use SSIS to accomplish this task easily.
Safety in Numbers
One of the core things a DBA must do is ensure backup and recovery of data. This Friday Steve Jones asks about your tolerance for safety and backup data in a Friday poll.
Tips for New DBAs
New and old DBAs alike can benefit from going back to the roots of the profession. This series of articles highlight the skills needed to move to the next level of Database Administration.
Azure Tutorial - Building a'Hello Word' app in Visual Studio
This article demonstrates how to build a simple Azure app using Visual Studio
SSIS Alpha Splits using the CODEPOINT() Function
A relatively common requirement in ETL processing is to break records into disparate outputs based on an alphabetical split on...
Covering Index using Included Columns
This article from Josef Richberg details the benefits of included columns for use in creating a covering index to improve performance.
Blogs
Five Ways Redshift Serverless Quietly Eats Your Budget
It is Friday, the queries are running, and nobody is watching the bill. That...
A Career of Memories
By Steve Jones
Annabel retired from Redgate Software this week. Across most of my career at Redgate,...
Rethinking Index Maintenance: Why avg_fragmentation_in_percent Is Outdated and What You Should Do Instead
By Tim Radney
As a SQL Server DBA with years of experience tuning production environments, I’ve seen...
Forums
Midjourney, Healthcare?
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Midjourney, Healthcare?
Changes, Happiness, and a Few Tears
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Changes, Happiness, and a Few...
BCP on Linux
Comments posted to this topic are about the item BCP on Linux
Question of the Day
BCP on Linux
When running bcp on Linux, what is the field terminator?
See possible answers