SQLServerCentral Article

Nightmare Contest

Murphy's law has struck us all, as evidenced by the disaster entries we've received in the past. Imceda software, makers of Litespeed are sponsoring a new contest, looking for your nightmares.

SQLServerCentral Article

Review: NGSSquirrel

NGS Software is in the security business and have been very successful in finding vulnerabilities in many products, notable SQL Server. They have used their expertise to build products to help you better secure your systems. Dale Corey looks at one of those products, NGSSquirrel, which does vulnerability assessment.

SQLServerCentral Article

Database Change Management: An Automated Approach

SQL Server change management is tough. The tools don't integrate with version control systems, there isn't good administrative controls to enforce control, and often you need to buy a third party tool to make this work. New Author Darren Fuller takes a look at the various ways in which you can implement version control in SQL Server. This is part one of a four part series on version control in SQL Server.

SQLServerCentral Article

Lookup Table Design

Designing a SQL Server database is a challenging task. Making decisions about how to build tables, their relations, etc. can be a full time job for any DBA helping to build an application. Lookup tables are a part of just about every application that you work with or build a back end for. Leo Peysakhovich brings us an article on database design that deals specifically with lookup tables.

SQLServerCentral Article

Review: SQLCentric

Monitoring your SQL Servers is something every DBA must do. Checking job status, disk space, etc. is a frequent question seen in our forums. Pearl Knowledge Solutions has developed a product to help you easily setup monitoring on your servers from a web interface. SQLCentric gets 4 stars from author Bruce Szabo; read his detailed review on this fine product.

SQLServerCentral Article

The Bowling Challenge

Know anything about bowling? Or writing hard core TSQL? Or test driven development? Even if you don't, this might be a good way to build those skills. Write a stored procedure that can score a bowling game and you might win one of our books and a shirt!

SQLServerCentral Article

Comparison of Oracle Drivers

Oracle is usually a dirty word in the SQL Server community, but like it or not, lots of data resides in Oracle databases. And SQL Server is often used to gather this data together in a warehouse of some sort for spinning cubes, generating reports, etc. Haidong Ji looks at the various methods that you can connect to an Oracle driver and compares the speed of each. If you need to get data from Oracle, or may need to, this is the place you want to start.

Blogs

The Book of Redgate: Spread across the world

By

This was Redgate in 2010, spread across the globe. First the EU/US Here’s Asia...

Merry Christmas

By

Today is Christmas and while I do not expect anybody to actual be reading...

Self-Hosting a Photo Server the Whole Family Can Use

By

Until recently, my family's 90,000+ photos have been hidden away in the depths of...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

Happy Holidays, Let's Do Nerdy Stuff

By Grant Fritchey

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Happy Holidays, Let's Do Nerdy...

UNISTR Escape

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item UNISTR Escape

Celebrating Tomorrow

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Celebrating Tomorrow

Visit the forum

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