Developer shops may decide to use Read Committed Snapshot Isolation (RCSI) to reduce contention, and possibly improve performance, but it is not without its own pitfalls. In this article, Uwe Ricken describes a situation where long running transactions caused a severe performance degradation when RCSI was in use.
We often make changes to production systems in an ad hoc manner. Steve asks how much auditing we might have in place.
You have times where you need to copy/paste something out of SSMS' grid view results pane that has a carriage return in it. Trying to copy/paste that data into Excel can be a headache and cause you to waste precious time reformatting. This just offers a tidbit of PowerShell code to help.
Stored procedures, for example, are very easy to document. The comment block at the beginning stays with the code and a CREATE or ALTER script contains everything to reproduce the proc. SQL Server tables, however, are more difficult to document. You can use Extended Properties to document columns and constraints, but working with Extended Properties is difficult at best. Phil Factor demonstrates ways to easily add Extended Properties to your build scripts.
Updates this week for SQL 2014, 2016, 2017 and SSMS have Steve thinking about the pace of patching.
This article shows how DefaultBufferMaxRows and DefaultBufferSize properties can be used to improve dataflow task performance.
Brent Ozar takes a look at four different ways to get a random row from a large SQL Server table.
Joe Celko reminisces about the origins of databases and one of the early pioneers, Charles Bachman. He explains how pointer chains were used to traverse data in the NDL standard and referential integrity that we use today.
Developers need to consider not only system performance when writing code, but also how readability impacts code maintenance.
By Steve Jones
“Don’t aim to have others like you; aim to have them respect you.” –...
Many years ago, before I joined Oracle, I was working on a major modernisation...
If you work with data pipelines, SQL, notebooks, or machine learning models, a Mac...
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When running DBCC CHECKDB on SQL Server 2025, can I include the Resource Database?
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