Understanding Your Value
Fill out the 2017 salary survey to help us all understand where our compensation might lie relative to others.
Summarizing Data Using the GROUPING SETS Operator
Writing aggregate queries is one of the most important tasks for anyone working with T-SQL. Determining the expressions required in the GROUP BY clause is not that difficult, but what do you do if you need to include different combinations of group by expressions in the same result set? Alfonso demonstrates how to use the GROUPING SETS operator to accomplish this task.
Holidays and Calendar Generation
Create the definition of your holidays and have them available for any year. Create a Calendar including holidays and business/work dates.
How to use Azure SQL Database features and settings
Vitor Montalvao explains how to work with the basic configuration settings for a SQL Azure database from the Microsoft Azure portal itself.
Questions About the GDPR That You Were Too Shy to Ask
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will affect organisations in countries around the world, not just those in Europe. The GDPR regulates how personal data is stored, moved, handled, and destroyed. Not following the regulation will lead to dire consequences for your organisation. As a data professional or developer, you may have many questions and might be wondering how it will affect the way you will do your job. William Brewer answers common questions about the GDPR that you were too shy to ask.
Partition Level Locking: Explanations From Outer Space
Erik Darling partitions the Stack Overflow database, then uses sp_WhoIsActive's @get_locks = 1 parameter to demo locking.
Advice for Newcomers
If you could look back on your career, is there some advice you wish you had? Is there something you'd tell people considering your job as a career? Let us know this Friday.
Checking SQL Server with Policy-Based Management
Policy-Based Management, a feature of SQL Server, is a flexible tool that can help DBAs manage one or more SQL Server instances. It's used for monitoring and enforcing a standard set of policies for SQL Server throughout an organization. While there are many built-in conditions from which to choose, Dennes demonstrates how to set up a custom policy as well as a standard one. Viewing the policy status over many servers can be tedious, so he also explains how DBAs can evaluate the states of multiple servers with just one glance.
Blogs
Breaking Rules in Rome
By Steve Jones
Last week I was honored with a trip to Rome for the Redgate President’s...
Databases and AI Agents
By Arun Sirpal
As part of my wider work exploring Claude Code and AI-assisted database engineering, I...
Creating a Pulsing Conducting Baton - Part 1
By Bert Wagner
Train Wreck The last time I watched a high school band nearly fall apart mid-performance...
Forums
Why Your Index Isn't Being Used? - Reading Execution Plans to Find the Real Culprit
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Why Your Index Isn't Being...
Distance Metric Algorithms
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Distance Metric Algorithms
What Can AI Really Do?
Comments posted to this topic are about the item What Can AI Really Do?
Question of the Day
Distance Metric Algorithms
What are the distance metric algorithms that can be used in VECTOR_DISTANCE()?
See possible answers