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
Why your data still can’t answer a simple question
Every organization I talk to has the same problem dressed up in different clothes....
T-SQL Tuesday #197 Invitation – An impactful session or two from a conference
By DataOnWheels
I am delighted to host this month’s T-SQL Tuesday invitation. If you are new...
Did You Really Name That Default?
By alevyinroc
Ten years (and a couple jobs) ago, I wrote about naming default constraints to...
Forums
The day-to-day pressures of a DBA team, and how we can work smarter with automation and AI
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The day-to-day pressures of a...
Daily aggregation of Azure Blob Storage by tier (created/tier-change/deleted)
Hello all, I’m looking for advice on how to derive a daily snapshot table...
SQL 2017 to SQL 2025. Good to Go ?
We need to replace our Windows server running SQL 2017. Any reason not to...
Question of the Day
Using OPENJSON
I have some data in a table that looks like this:
BeerID BeerName brewer beerdescription 1 Becks Interbrew Beck's is a German-style pilsner beer 2 Fat Tire New Belgium Toasty malt, gentle sweetness, flash of fresh hop bitterness. 3 Mac n Jacks Mac & Jack's Brewery This beer erupts with a floral, hoppy taste 4 Alaskan Amber Alaskan Brewing Alaskan Brewing Amber Ale is an "alt" style beer 8 Kirin Kirin Brewing Kirin Ichiban is a Lager-type beerIf I run this, what is returned?
select t1.[key]
from openjson((select t.* FROM Beer AS t for json path)) t1 See possible answers