Question of the Day Section Added
Learn SQL Server the fun way through a bite-sized SQL Server question each day. Scores are kept so you'll know how you stack up against your peers in various categories.
Customers Don't Know What They Want
This article on the JoelonSoftware site discusses project management and customer expectations. It has a great discussion of why non-technical users place so much value on what they can see (the GUI) while developers place so much value in what can't be seen (yeah, the code!). It's actually more interesting than that, take a look!
DB2 A Worthy Competitor?
Recently Steve Jones spent a week working with IBM's DB2 database. Read about his thoughts and impressions of this SQL Server competitor.
Dependency Walker
Dependency Walker has been around for a while as part of Visual Studio. Have you tried it? Got the latest version? Andy does a very quick run through of what the product does, why you might need it, where to get the latest version, and why the new version is better than the old one (isn't it always?).
Find out about free Trade Publications
This is a great site that lists all the free trade publications in various industries. You have to meet the criteria of course, but you should definitely check out the offerings.
Importing And Analyzing Event Logs
Another new author! Gheorge shares some ideas about importing event logs and using OLAP to analyze the results. Not a bad idea at all. How many of use OLAP as often as we should? Read the article, see if it's something you want to try - and let Gheorge know what you think!
Red Gate Web Site Usability Survey
Red Gate asked if we would run a link to a short survey they are working on. Should only take a couple minutes and no personal information is required. They've been an advertiser with us since almost the beginning so we're glad to pass this along to our readers.
Trapping DTS errors with Transact-SQL
Joe has written some articles for us, he also some interesting comment on his site - this article looks at trapping errors such as timeouts or divide by zero.
Changing Rogue Database Collations
Collations hard to sort out (I know, bad joke)? Mike did what a good DBA gets paid to do, figure out an easy way to fix something and remove the chance of a user mistake at the same time. Good explanation and a couple scripts show how to handle column level collations.
Is Steve Jones Really Steve Jones?
Alien imposter? No, not that complicated. Andy saw an actor on TV that according to some looks JUST like our own Steve Jones. Steve is a good sport about such things and provided several photo's so you could judge for yourself. Of course, there is a little more to the story - read the article to see!
Blogs
Local LLM Models at SQL Saturday Boston 2025
By Steve Jones
I’m starting a long trip at Boston this weekend. I’ll be there Saturday speaking,...
3 things you must do to start data quality management right
As a data & AI strategist who’s seen countless projects succeed and fail, I...
Set Theory vs. Batch Mode in SQL Server
By SQLPals
Set Theory vs. Batch Mode in SQL Server Not long ago,...
Forums
Changing the Recovery Time
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Changing the Recovery Time
Getting More Time from AI
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Getting More Time from AI
When Page Prefetching Takes a Back Seat – Exploring Trace Flag 652 in SQL Server
Comments posted to this topic are about the item When Page Prefetching Takes a...
Question of the Day
Changing the Recovery Time
I want to change the recovery time for a database running on SQL Server 2022. What are my options for setting the value in my ALTER DATABASE statement. If I run this code, what can I use in place of the xxx to define what 12 means?
ALTER DATABASE Finance SET TARGET_RECOVERY_TIME = 12 xxx;See possible answers