Microsoft BI Certifications or Why SQL is a 4-Letter Word
A look at the BI certification experience of a senior consultant and developer. New author
Mining or Profiling
The more data you have, the better you should be able to predict something. Or at least that's one of the things that I learned while studying economics. If we could actually gather enough data about someone or some system, we could determine what the most likely outputs of the system will be. In the […]
Aggregating Correlated Sub-Queries
Every now and then you may attempt to calculate an aggregate function -- such as SUM() -- on a correlated subquery, only to encounter the following error:
Output Parameters
Regular columnist Robert Marda writes about the basics of using output parameters. If you're not using output params we hope this article will get you started - they are a great way to return less data to the client, perfect if you need only a few values and not a recordset/resultset.
What's Fair
If you read my recent editorial called Get Some Help, you realize that I didn't get any World Series tickets from the sale on the Colorado Rockie's web site. Not to berate the subject, but some friends and I had an interesting debate on how the situation was handled and what could be done differently.
Data is at the Heart of Enterprise-Wide BI and DW, Part 3
My online series of articles has been focused on the need for businesses to "get serious" about their approach to developing an enterprise business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW) capability. When pursuing this capability it is important to adopt a holistic view, followed by disciplined investment and execution.
Microsoft Windows PowerShell and SQL Server 2005 SMO – Part 9
Learn how to use PowerShell in conjunction with SMO to Generate an SQL Server Script.
Mini-Me
Will the next version of Windows be a "Mini-Me" version of Vista? Who knows, and it's too early to tell, but apparently there's a mini-kernel version of Windows 7, the one after Vista, which fits into 25MB on disk. That's a touch lower than the 4GB that Vista takes up. Granted it's not a full […]
Views for Abstraction
Views are one of the more basic constructs in SQL Server, but often it seems that developers are not sure when to use them. SQL Server expert DBA and trainer Andy Warren brings us a look at views as an abstraction layer in your database.
Celko on SQL: Natural, Artificial and Surrogate Keys Explained
SQL programming guru Joe Celko offers a classification scheme and advice on using the right keys.
Blogs
Who Are You Doing It For?
By Brian Kelley
But as I've matured over the years, I came to realize that I needed...
Presenting Twice in May 2026
By alevyinroc
I will be presenting my latest session, Documenting Your Work for Worry-Free Vacations, in-person...
Finding the Next Sequence Value: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
I saw a question asking about the next sequence value and decided to try...
Forums
DB Design Methods
I've read a few posts regarding what we use to design DB models and...
Auto Update Statistics not triggering on filtered indexes
I've got a table with 186,703,969 rows, about 300GB of data. There are several...
What is the difference between SQL Server and SQL Database?
I created a SQL Database in Azure Portal but I've just noticed it also...
Question of the Day
An Unusual Identity
What values are returned when I run this code?
CREATE TABLE dbo.IdentityTest2
(
id NUMERIC(10,0) IDENTITY(10,10) PRIMARY KEY,
somevalue VARCHAR(20)
)
GO
INSERT dbo.IdentityTest2
(
somevalue
)
VALUES
( 'Steve')
, ('Bill')
GO
SELECT top 10
id
FROM dbo.IdentityTest2 See possible answers