The Challenges of Being Safe
Securing your data is a challenge. Steve Jones has a few comments no just how hard it can be to obfuscate your production data as you move it to development environments.
Solving Oracle Performance Issues in 4 Easy Steps
Join us for a look at how SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) provides detailed performance data for Oracle environments, allowing DBAs to solve complex performance issues in less than four steps.
When SQL Server Performance goes Bad: the Fill Factor and Excessive Fragmentation
Phil Factor on the fill factor, pages splits and index fragmentation, and how SQL Monitor can help you decide if a custom fill factor for certain indexes might help alleviate performance issues.
It Depends
It depends. The mantra of many DBAs and others in IT. Steve Jones reminds us why it applies.
SSIS Variable and Parameter Analysis
Use T-SQL to analyse the usage of all variables and parameters in an SSIS project, including the identification of any unused variables and parameters.
How to Find the Estimation Cost for a Query
Discover how to estimate the cost of a query. Read on to see an example of how to extract the Estimated Cost for execution plans stored in the procedure cache.
Take our short readers’ survey and win a $50 Amazon voucher
Could you spare 3 minutes to help us out at SQL Server Central/Simple Talk? Take this short survey, tell us about who you are and why you come to Simple Talk/SQL Server Central, and you could win a $50 Amazon voucher.
DAX for SQL Folks: Part III - DAX Calculations
Introduction In response to my approach in the pop...
Open Source is Not a Career Path
A reprint from the early days of SQLServerCentral as Steve is on vacation. Here is Steve Jones' Open Source Musings from February 3, 2005.
Improve Row Count Estimates for Table Variables without Changing Code
Table variables can cause performance issues with joins when they contain a large number of rows. In SQL Server 2019, Microsoft has improved how the optimizer works with table variables which can improve performance without making changes to your code. In this article, Greg Larsen explains how this feature works and if it really does make a difference.
Blogs
Learn about Modern Microsoft Apps in San Diego
By Steve Jones
I wrote about learning today for the editorial: I Can’t Make You Learn. I...
How To Deploy Fabric SQL and Azure SQL Databases with Azure DevOps
By ReviewMyDB
Fabric has CI/CD built in, but if you've tried to use it for database...
A New Word: Attriage
By Steve Jones
attriage – n. the state of having lost all control over how you feel...
Forums
Getting results from a Procedure to join to a query
I have a need to execute a stored procedure and return the results to...
Upgrade 2016 Standard to 2022 Express
Title pretty much says it all - can this be done? I've tried several...
BIT_COUNT II
Comments posted to this topic are about the item BIT_COUNT II
Question of the Day
BIT_COUNT II
In SQL Server 2025, I have a table (dbo.UserPermission) that contains this data:
UserID UserPermissions 15 23 37 4 NULLWhat is returned when I run this code:
select bit_count(UserPermissions) as PermissionCount from dbo.UserPermission where UserID = 4;See possible answers