The Five Year Plan

Is your IT department outdated? There's a prediction that they won't be around in five years. Steve Jones doesn't agree.

Your Professional Development and the PASS Organization

There are so many ways of keeping your technical skills and knowledge up-to-date. There are books, articles, conferences, video courses and so on, but nothing beats discussion and debate with professional people in other organisations facing a similar range of technical challenges, some of which you share, and others you maybe haven't yet. PASS is unique in providing just this vital ingredient for database professionals using the Microsoft Data Stack.

The One Metric to Rule Them All

Measuring the performance of systems isn't always just CPU, RAM, and Disk IO. Today Steve Jones looks at business based metrics.

Some Tips for Minimising the Pain of HTML Input Forms

HTML Input forms are, by their nature, tiresome for the user of any website. However, with some attention to detail and a dash of JavaScript, it is possible to reduce the drudgery of form-filling to the minimum and minimise mistakes. Dino explains four ways of making things better for the user of your website.

Troubleshooting a painful query using execution plans in SQL Monitor

When something's wrong with your database you need to be able to identify the primary pain points within SQL Server and get to the root cause of the problem fast. Grant Fritchey explains how you can use execution plans inside SQL Monitor to help quickly and simply identify the problem.

Downloading multiple files from internet with SSIS and C#

This is a tutorial to download multiple files from internet using the SSIS Script Task.

Testing Coders

It seems that everyone has a different idea on how to interview people. Today Steve Jones looks at the technique of having someone improve some code in real time.

Can comments hamper stored procedure performance?

After a recent conversation on Twitter, Aaron Bertrand shows where excessive comments in your stored procedures might have an impact on performance.

Byte Me: Meltdown

Cloning a SQL Server Login with all permissions using PowerShell

Cloning a SQL Server login with permissions that match another login is a common task. In this post, Jeffrey Yao shows how this an be done using PowerShell.