Handling Aggregations on a Poorly Designed Database
When the database design is not great, you may have to write some creative queries to get what you need.
The Dangers of using Float or Real Datatypes
Floating point datatypes accommodate very big numbers but sacrifice precision. They are handy for some types of scientific calculations, but are dangerous when used more widely, because they can introduce big rounding errors.
Using SQL Server RAND Function Deep Dive
Dr. Dallas Snider, a MSSQLTips author, mentioned that SQL Server RAND() function could generate random values uniformly distributed from 0 through 1, exclusive. He generated random numbers from the normal distribution with a specific mean and standard deviation.
A New World of Data
I started in the early days of SQL Server, when having a gigabyte of disk storage was unheard of, much less a gigabyte of RAM. My watch has more storage space than the mainframe we replaced with an early version of SQL Server years ago. The technical possibilities and amounts of data we are capable […]
A quick search without an index
Alex Chamchourine explains how he managed to find a row in a billion row table without an index.
Checking for Database Events Using Extended Events and SQL Monitor
You need to make sure that nobody tampers with your production databases, or really any databases outside Development. Even if you weren't of a nervous disposition, you'd want to know if a database was stopped or removed. You'd also be intrigued by the sudden unrehearsed addition of a database to a production server.
Simple DBCC CHECKDB process to report on database corruption for all SQL Server databases
As DBAs, we all know how important it is to check all of the SQL Server databases under our care for potential corruption issues. However, to accomplish that, we might not have the time to do any of the following:
Collections
Problem The usage of a collection of integers in some scenarios is considered to be optimal because of the overhead involved by the creation of another user table used just to store numbers, which is the most common solution. What are collections of integers? They are lists or arrays consisting of integers. The number of […]
Blogs
Monday Monitor Tips: Intelligent Alert Thresholds
By Steve Jones
At the recent Redgate Summit in Chicago, I demo’d (lightly) the ML based Alert...
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...
Forums
String_agg not working as needed
I'm trying to get this string_agg to put all the 'comments' into one result...
Vectors in SQL Server 2025
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Vectors in SQL Server 2025
Odd Sequences
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Odd Sequences
Question of the Day
Odd Sequences
What values are returned from this code?
CREATE SEQUENCE NumericSequence
AS NUMERIC(5,1)
START WITH 1.0
INCREMENT BY 0.1;
GO
SELECT NEXT VALUE FOR NumericSequence
GO
SELECT NEXT VALUE FOR NumericSequence
GO See possible answers