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!
Test Your SQL Server Security Skills and Compete with your Friends!
Test to see how much you know about SQL Server security. If you're one of the members to pass the test (72% score or higher), you're entered into a contest to win a copy of AppDetective and one year's worth of support (over $1500 value)! You can only take the test question test once and it is not timed. After the test, you'll be given the answers and why one answer is more correct than another. Questions are randomly chosen from a pool.
COM+, SQL Server, Serializable isolation level and the issues!
This article shows you how to identify SQL Server performance problems and explains how the SERIALIZABLE transaction isolation level effected the performance of an OLTP application.
Blogs
A New Word: los vidados
By Steve Jones
los vidados – n. the half-remembered acquaintances you knew years ago, who you might...
In-Person CISA Training – April 13-16, 2026
By Brian Kelley
I will be leading an in-person Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) exam prep class...
EightKB 2026
EightKB is back again for 2026! The biggest online SQL Server internals conference is...
Forums
query to track time spent on individual tasks in SSIS
Hi everyone I am looking at building a query to determine how much time...
SQL Server Transactional Replication from Always On Availability Groups to Azure SQL Database
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server Transactional Replication from...
Hidden Heroes
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Hidden Heroes
Question of the Day
Identities and Sequences I
When thinking of the Identity property for auto incrementing columns and sequences for the same action, which are explicitly linked to increment a number in a table when a new row is added?
See possible answers