A Lightweight, Self-adjusting, Baseline-less Data Monitor
Can data alert us that something is going on, without baselines and thresholds?
The Blame Game
Equifax is blaming a single IT person for their data breach. Steve Jones worries this is a sign of things to come.
Statistics in SQL: Student’s t-test
Many undergraduates have misunderstood the name 'Students' in the t-test to imply that it was designed as a simple test suitable for students. In fact it was William Sealy Gosset, an Englishman publishing under the pseudonym Student, who developed the t-test and t distribution in 1908, as a way of making confident predictions from small sample sizes of normally-distributed variables. As Gosset's employer was Guinness, the brewer, Phil Factor takes a sober view of calculating it in SQL.
Network Configuration of SQL Server Always On Availability Groups in Azure
Implementing SQL Server Failover Clustering in Azure virtual machines differs in several aspects from its on-premises implementations. These differences reflect some of the unique characteristics of the storage and network infrastructure services in the Microsoft cloud environment. In this article, Marcin Policht looks at the networking aspects of clustered deployments of SQL Server 2016 in Azure.
Citizen Scientists
More and more people are becoming citizen scientists, even in companies. Steve Jones thinks this is helpful, but we still need professionals.
Automated Database Provisioning for Development and Testing
If your development team needs to work on anonymised copies of the current production database, and if changes are being delivered rapidly as well, that could mean a lot of time and routine DevOps work copying databases. SQL Clone was designed for tasks like this. Grant Fritchey investigates whether you save time, effort and scripting over the more traditional approach, and at what point it makes sense to use it.
The Achilles Heel
In a long career in IT, Phil Factor cannot recall a 'major incident', where the failure or breach was due to a single 'Achilles Heel', or even a single team of people. They are always due to a whole plethora of slack and ignorant practices.
Indexing for Windowing Functions: WHERE vs. OVER
Erik Darling shows that if you take SQL Server's word when it asks for an index, things can go horribly awry.
Blogs
Rolling Back a Broken Release
By Steve Jones
We had an interesting discussion about deployments in databases and how you go forward...
A bespoke reporting solution doesn’t have to cost the earth
By ChrisJenkins
You could be tolerating limited reporting because there isn’t an off the shelf solution...
Presenting with Visual Studio Code
A while back I wrote a quick post on setting up key mappings in...
Forums
Lots of FKs
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Lots of FKs
Real-time On-prem SQL Server Data in Excel – Over the Internet
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Real-time On-prem SQL Server Data...
Can You Let Go of Determinism
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Can You Let Go of...
Question of the Day
Lots of FKs
In SQL Server 2025, what are the most outgoing and incoming FK references a table can have?
See possible answers