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
Flyway Tips: AI Generating Migration Script Names
By Steve Jones
AI is a big deal in 2026, and at Redgate, we’re experimenting with how...
The Book of Redgate: Get the right stuff done
By Steve Jones
Another of our values: The facing page has this quote: “We admire people who...
Runing tSQLt Tests with Claude
By Ed Elliott
Running tSQLt unit tests is great from Visual Studio but my development workflow...
Forums
No Defaults Passwords Ever
Comments posted to this topic are about the item No Defaults Passwords Ever
Introduction of OPTIMIZE_FOR_SEQUENTIAL_KEY = ON
Hi, We have low latency high volume system. I have a table having 3...
The Long Name
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Long Name
Question of the Day
The Long Name
I run this code to create a table:
When I check the length, I get these results:
A table name is limited to 128 characters. How does this work?