How Do You Handle the Stress of Being a DBA?
How do you deal with all the pressures, stress, and problems in being a DBA? Today we have a guest editorial from Brad McGehee that asks the question.
The power of batching Transactions
This article analyzes the performance gains of batching multiple DML statements into a single transaction. New author Manor Lev-Tov examines the effect of grouping statements together instead of running them all as separate transactions.
How To Enable Caching in SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)
We have many SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) reports that use our OLTP systems as data sources. We are always adding new reports and the number of users running these reports is also increasing rapidly. We would like to look at enabling report caching as a way to reduce some of the load on our database servers. In this tip I will go over the steps needed to enable report caching for SQL Server Reporting Services reports.
Help Others, Help Yourself
There is something to be said for helping others. However it isn't necessarily a selfless act. Guest writer Tim Mitchell talks a little about how helping others has helped him.
Retrieving Identities on set-based inserts
Learn a foolproof way to get identity values for multi-row inserts with the OUTPUT clause in SQL Server 2005 without using a cursor.
Full Text Index Queries using CONTAINS and CONTAINSTABLE
Recent installments of our SQL Server 2005 Express Edition series have been discussing its implementation of Full Text Indexing. This article focuses on the remaining two constructs, CONTAINS and CONTAINSTABLE.
Perfect is the Enemy of Good
Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren. We all would love to have perfect code, but is always worth the time? Andy Warren notes that cutting a corner or two might make sense at times.
Recovering data from corrupt tables using non-clustered indexes
At times database corruption happens and no good recovery path is available. It is possible to salvage data from indexes using query hints.
Finding Invalid SQL Logins
As many of you know the system stored procedure sp_validatelogins is used for finding invalid logins. Although sp_validatelogins is useful there's...
SQLSaturday #32 - Tampa, FL
If you are in the area, come to this great one day training event in Tampa, FL.
Blogs
Upgrading SQL Server Containers on the Laptop
By Steve Jones
I don’t have SQL Server installed on my laptop. In an effort to keep...
How to Find Expensive Queries in Amazon Redshift
Slow-running queries can degrade your Redshift cluster’s performance and lead to increased costs. Identifying...
The Notification Trap: How Input Fatigue Is Killing Deep Work in Tech
By gbargsley
If you've been here before, you know this blog is usually about SQL Server,...
Forums
SQL 2019 instance with AG, across 2 Windows 2016 OS servers - OSin-place upgrade
Hi all Can I get some perspective from the community please on performing in-place...
How Long is a Long I/O?
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How Long is a Long...
T-SQL Trigonometric Functions in SQL Server
Comments posted to this topic are about the item T-SQL Trigonometric Functions in SQL...
Question of the Day
How Long is a Long I/O?
In SQL Server 2025, a long I/O is recorded in the error log with message 833. How long much an I/O request be outstanding before this message is written to the log?
See possible answers