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.
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.
Think like a DBA
What do your programmers do with nulls? Do they know nullif, isnull, what about the powerful coalesce function? Do they think DBA's look at the world differently? Why, it's all code isn't it?
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.
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.
SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 Is Out!!!
The highly anticipated Beta 2 of SQL Server 2005 aka Yukon, was released today (Monday, July 26).
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.
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!
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.
Tutorial: Changing the Visibility Objects in Reporting Services
In the last tutorial in this series of Reporting Services tutorials we added conditional formatting to the report. Now that we have created our first report and have added a bit of flare to it, we will go ahead and make it even cleaner. In this very quick demonstration, we will go ahead and change the visibility of rows or columns based on given conditions.
Blogs
Tooling for Success: The Best FinOps Tools and Technologies
By HeyMo0sh
As a DevOps person, I know that to make FinOps successful, you need more...
From Planning to Practice: Setting Up Your FinOps Framework
By HeyMo0sh
As someone who works in DevOps, I’m always focused on creating systems that are...
“We love to debate minutiae”
By Brian Kelley
I am guilty as charged. The quote was in reference to how people argue...
Forums
Restoring On Top II
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SQL Art 2: St Patrick’s Day in SSMS (Shamrock + Pint + Pixel Text)
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Breaking Down Your Work
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Question of the Day
Restoring On Top II
I have a database, DNRTest, that has a number of tables and other objects in it. The other day, I was trying to mock up a test and ran this code on the same server:
-- run yesterday CREATE DATABASE DNRTest2 GO USE DNRTest2 GO CREATE TABLE NewTable (id INT) GOToday, I realize that I need a copy of DNRTest for another mockup, and I run this:
-- run today USE Master BACKUP DATABASE DNRTest TO DISK = 'dnrtest.bak' GO RESTORE DATABASE DNRTest2 FROM DISK = 'dnrtest.bak' WITH REPLACEWhat happens? See possible answers