SQLServerCentral Article

Can You Compute?

Transact-SQL in SQL Server 2000 has some interesting features, many of which most DBAs will never use. While many DBAs are famliar with the basic aggregate functions, there are a few that are advanced and not well understood. The ROLLUP and COMPUTE operators are two of these and David Poole takes a look at how these work and a practical application for them.

Technical Article

Trace-scrubbing Tools

Andrew Zanevsky shares his trace-scrubbing procedures that make it easy for you to handle large trace files and aggregate transactions by type–even when captured T-SQL code has variations.

SQL Server Profiler is a veritable treasure trove when it comes to helping DBAs optimize their T-SQL code. But, the surfeit of riches (I'm reminded of the Arabian Nights tale of Aladdin) can be overwhelming. I recently had one of those "sinking" feelings when I first tried to make sense of the enormous amount of data collected by traces on a client's servers. At this particular client, the online transactions processing system executes more than 4 million database transactions per hour. That means that even a 30-minute trace that captures "SQL Batch Completed" events results in a table with 2 million rows. Of course, it's simply impractical to process so many records without some automation, and even selecting the longest or most expensive transactions doesn't necessarily help in identifying bottlenecks. After all, short transactions can be the culprits of poor performance when executed thousands of times per minute.

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UNISTR Escape

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Question of the Day

UNISTR Escape

In SQL Server 2025, I run this command:

SELECT UNISTR('*3041*308A*304C\3068 and good night', '*') as "A Classic";
What is returned? (assume the database has an appropriate collation) A: B: C:

See possible answers