Leveling up Core Skills: A Pattern for Launching an Internal Training Initiative
Today, Julia Hayward explains how Redgate is leveling up core skills.
General Purpose Tier for Azure SQL Database
Five years ago, there were a limited number of ways to deploy and use the SQL Server engine in the Azure Cloud. Today, there are many different services available.
Record responses for the State of Database DevOps report
The fourth annual State of Database DevOps report is now available for download. Kendra Little announces the launch in her latest blog. Check out the first high level findings of the report here.
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.
Blogs
Advice I Like: Respect
By Steve Jones
“Don’t aim to have others like you; aim to have them respect you.” –...
Blue Sky Programming – The Optimism Trap
Many years ago, before I joined Oracle, I was working on a major modernisation...
Setting Up a Mac for Data Engineering and AI Work
If you work with data pipelines, SQL, notebooks, or machine learning models, a Mac...
Forums
SQL Art, Part 4: Happy 4th of July — A British DBA's Guide to Celebrating a War We Don't Talk About
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Art, Part 4: Happy...
Is Fabric a Reliable Service or a Ripped Resource?
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Is Fabric a Reliable Service...
locking down agent for new user on our dev machine
hi , a new user wants to be able to add sql agent jobs...
Question of the Day
BIT_COUNT I
In SQL Server 2025, I have a table (dbo.UserPermission) that contains this data:
UserID UserPermissions 15 23 37What is returned when I run this code:
select bit_count(UserPermissions) as PermissionCount from dbo.UserPermission where UserID = 3;See possible answers