A Good Word for ODBC
A guest editorial from Phil Factor puts in a good word for ODBC. This is the standard for Windows machines to connect to all kinds of data sources, and is both loved and hated by developers of all kinds.
Less Than a Week - PASS 2009 Summit
A last push for the 2009 PASS Summit before registration goes up.
Managing Free Space
A new article from Paul Els looks at managing free space on your database servers by finding detached databases and old backup files.
Date Expression Compilation in SSIS
There are many different ways to manipulate dates when working with them in SSIS. Many great examples have been posted...
PASS Connector Editorial for Sep 9, 2009
I currently write the editorial for the PASS Connector which is published every two weeks as part of my role...
Understanding Scans And Seeks
Whether a query uses Scan or Seek can have a big impact on the cost of excuting that query. This article examines when each is used and which is optimal.
Using Star Join and Few-Outer-Row Optimizations to Improve Data Warehousing Queries
In this white paper we discuss two of the new features in SQL Server 2008, Star Join and Few-Outer-Row optimizations. We test the performance of SQL Server 2008 on a set of complex data warehouse queries designed to highlight the effect of these two features and observed a significant performance gain over SQL Server 2005 (without these two features).
Finding Passwords
There was a vulnerability announced in the SQL Server password system last week, but Steve Jones doesn't see this as much of an issue. Read his thoughts and see if you agree.
Returning full error details from SQL Server Agent jobs
Tired of the truncated error history that is available for SQL Server Agent jobs in SSMS, here is a way to get deeper information - easily!
EVA Partition Alignment
Partition alignment is a well documented best practice, but does it have any benefit on an HP EVA?
Blogs
Advice I Like: Respect
By Steve Jones
“Don’t aim to have others like you; aim to have them respect you.” –...
Blue Sky Programming – The Optimism Trap
Many years ago, before I joined Oracle, I was working on a major modernisation...
Setting Up a Mac for Data Engineering and AI Work
If you work with data pipelines, SQL, notebooks, or machine learning models, a Mac...
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...
Is Fabric a Reliable Service or a Ripped Resource?
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Is Fabric a Reliable Service...
locking down agent for new user on our dev machine
hi , a new user wants to be able to add sql agent jobs...
Question of the Day
BIT_COUNT I
In SQL Server 2025, I have a table (dbo.UserPermission) that contains this data:
UserID UserPermissions 15 23 37What is returned when I run this code:
select bit_count(UserPermissions) as PermissionCount from dbo.UserPermission where UserID = 3;See possible answers