External Article

Two Stops Short of Dagenham

One of the best programmers I ever met was referred to, in Essex jargon, as being ‘two stops short of Dagenham’ (Barking)*. This was once no obstacle to the world of work…the best development teams I’ve worked on embraced the whole gamut of humanity

Technical Article

Cycling the ERRORLOG file and Deleting Backup History Information

Every DBA needs a few tricks up his/her sleeves to help them better manage their SQL Server 2000 environment. In this article I will explore a couple of such tricks. I will first explore how to cycle the SQL Server error log, and why you might want to do this. Secondly I will discuss backup history information and why you would need to periodically remove some of the older history information.

SQLServerCentral Article

Server Consolidation

Are you thinking about consolidating your SQL Servers on to fewer machines? It is an interesting idea and one that is definitely more possible with SQL Server 2005 and 64-bit servers. Steve Jones takes a look at some of the pros and cons of moving to fewer servers.

External Article

Practical SQL Server 2005 CLR Assemblies

One advantage of CLR assemblies is the ability to consume web services from within the database. This wouldn’t be easy with T-SQL, and would also require a lot of work in an unmanaged extended stored procedure. With .NET, it’s almost as simple as accessing a local DLL. There are just a couple of extra command-line utilities we need to run to be able to access web services from within a SQL assembly:

SQLServerCentral Article

Differential Backup Prediction

SQL Server 2000 has a rock solid backup scheme , but do you really need to run full backups every day? What if you could decide on the fly if it was more efficient for a full or a differential backup? Darwin Hatheway brings us the basis for a scheme that can predict the size of a differential backup by examining how much of the database has changed.

Technical Article

Try/Catch Block in SQL Server 2005

Server 2005 now supports a more programmable error trapping convention in T-SQL code. This error handling is known as the TRY/CATCH block. The TRY/CATCH block allows T-SQL to handling errors like other programming languages, such as Microsoft Visual C# and C++. In addition to the TRY/CATCH block, Microsoft has expanded the set of available system functions in SQL Server 2005 for returning error codes and messages when an error occurs in your T-SQL code. This article will explore the new TRY/CATCH block and explain the new system functions for returning error codes and messages.

Blogs

Keeping Redshift System Table History Past 7 Days with S3 Tables

By

Redshift keeps its SYS_* monitoring views for seven days in cluster, which is fine...

Updating the Data API Builder

By

I was updating my session for the Data API Builder (DAB) recently, mostly to...

T-SQL Tuesday #202 Invitation: That One SQL Server Outage You’ll Never Forget

By

I am excited to host T-SQL Tuesday for the first time. I want to...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

Practical Ways to Approach SQL Server Problems and Case Studies

By academicexpertt

Working with SQL Server can involve more than just writing queries. Understanding database design,...

Measuring Productivity

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Measuring Productivity

Importing Excel files into SQL Server using DuckDB and Python

By Cláudio Tereso

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Importing Excel files into SQL...

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

Tracking All the Queries

I have 3 instances of a brand new long running query that are executing on a SQL Server 2025 instance. Query store is enabled. One of the queries is killed by the administrator, one is cancelled by the user. The other runs to completion. How many rows are in Query Store for this query?

See possible answers