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[Video] Free DBA Training Month: Configuring TempDB, Lock Pages in Memory, and the DAC

While you’re stuck inside wondering if you’ll ever be able to attend a user group meeting again, I’m giving you free access to training materials that your boss probably wouldn’t have been nice enough to buy you anyway. So far this week, we’ve covered DBCC CHECKDB, how to set up Ola Hallengren’s maintenance scripts, and restoring for oops deletes. Today, let’s talk about two common configuration issues. Don’t dilly-dally on these though: these blog posts will be online during May only, and they’ll disappear on June 1.

SQLServerCentral Article

The IDENTITY Column Property

There are a number of ways to generate key values in SQL Server tables including the IDENTITY column property, the NEWID() function and more recently, SEQUENCES. The IDENTITY column property is the earliest of these methods. It was introduced very early in the history of SQL Server and it is arguably the simplest approach. Though old, IDENTITY is still maintained in modern versions of SQL Server and is still relevant for simple use cases.

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Question of the Day

Getting the Average

I have this data in the dbo.Commission table in a SQL Server 2022 database. 

salesperson commission
Brian       12
Brian       16
Andy        7
Andy        14
Andy        21
Steve       20
Steve       NULL
All the data is a varchar, and I decide to run this query to get the totals for each salesperson. 
SELECT SalesPerson
     , AVG(TRY_PARSE(Commission AS int)) AS TotalCommission
 FROM commission
 GROUP BY SalesPerson
GO
What average commission is calculated for Steve?

See possible answers