Missing Data
In the real world of business or scientific reporting and analysis, data can prove to be awkward. It can be plain wrong or it can be altogether missing. Sure, we have the NULL to signify unknown, but that doesn't play well with regular business reporting. There are a number of ways of dealing with missing information, and methods of estimating data from existing data has a long and respectable history. Joe Celko gets to grips with a data topic that is often treated with some trepidation.
Advanced Analytics with R & SQL: Part I - R Distributions
Build and Operationalize scalable Predictive models and intelligent applications using SQL and R.
How Long Before You Upgrade?
This Friday Steve Jones wants to know about the lifetime of your instances. Do you have some idea on how long you'll run a particular version of a platform?
Mixing MongoDB and Relational Databases in the Enterprise
Your Agile developers want MongoDB, or a similar document database: your Ops people are concerned about security and backup, and Governance are muttering about transactionality and data transfer between systems. Do you restrict your developers from rapidly-evolving the data design for their domain or do you embrace the joys of NoSQL unconditionally? If you accept a polyglot database environment, where the NoSQL lambs coexist with the relational lions, how do you provide tools and common database concepts that everyone can use and understand?
Change Integer to BigInt on a Very Large Table
This article will show how to change the data type of a column when the table contains more than 1 billion records.
Introverted vs Extroverted
A lot of us are introverted, so is there anything that can be done about it?
How to Do a SQL Server Architecture Review
How do you get management to help you figure out if a cluster or an AG is right for you? In this post, Brent Ozar explains the steps involved when doing a review of your SQL Server architecture.
Should We Move to Azure?
This week Steve Jones asks about moving to the cloud and how interesting that might be to the community?
SQL Server R Services: Working with Data Frames
Although you can get started with R in SQL Server without understanding data frames, they are a key structure of the R language that are the equivalent of SQL Server table variables. They give you many ways of manipulating and analyzing data and passing it between R and SQL Server. For a database professional, they provide a clear and familiar concept when getting to grips with integrating R into the database.
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...
SQL Server Still Wins
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server Still Wins
DBCC CHECKDB Limits I
Comments posted to this topic are about the item DBCC CHECKDB Limits I
Question of the Day
DBCC CHECKDB Limits I
When running DBCC CHECKDB on SQL Server 2025, can I include the Resource Database?
See possible answers