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From DBA to DWA

Everyone wants to know what a DBA does and it is becoming a hard question to answer as the responsibilities and capabilities of database platforms increase. Longtime author Vincent Rainardi brings us the proposition of a new type fo DBA, one that focuses more on data warehousing.

SQLServerCentral Editorial

Unethical or Just Sneaky

One of the fundamental rules of a stable, controlled production system is that you apply updates singly, after they've been tested, and you document the change. This way you can ensure that if a problem occurs, you can do some backtracking to see what might have caused instability.

SQLServerCentral Editorial

What's an Outage?

I caught this quote from Microsoft Watch, and thought it was very interesting. It definitely addresses an issue I've wondered about for some time. It talks about the WGA server issues and had this great quote from the WGA Product Manager:

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Question of the Day

Fixing the Error

On SQL Server 2025, I have a database that has this collation: SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS. I decide I want to run this code:

SELECT UNISTR('*3041*308A*304C*3068 and good night', '*') AS 'A Classic';
I get this error:Msg 9844, Level 16, State 4, Line 24 The char/varchar input type uses an unsupported collation. Only a UTF8 collation is supported with char/varchar input type in UNISTR function.What is the easiest way to fix this error?

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