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!
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 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?).
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
By Steve Jones
Here are the resources for my talk at Day of Data Boston. Slides –...
By Steve Jones
I’ve covered the values in a number of previous posts on the Book of...
By Arun Sirpal
When the evidence names the database, it says so. When it doesn’t, it stops....
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Split Large Queries in Athena...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Finding Trailing Spaces
I have some data in a SQL Server 2025 database. It looks like this for the dbo.Customer table:
CustomerID CustomerName PreferredName 1 Steve Steve 2 Andy Andy 3 Brian Brian 4 Allan Allan 5 Devin Devin 6 Steve Steve 7 Sally SallyI want to detect which names have a single trailing space. The CustomerName is a varchar() and the PreferredName is a CHAR(). Does this query detect the problem rows?
SELECT
CustomerID,
CustomerName,
PreferredName
FROM Customer
WHERE CustomerName <> RTRIM(CustomerName)
OR PreferredName <> RTRIM(PreferredName); See possible answers