Capture the Flag

A competition among software bots may foretell a vision of the future for software developers.

Monitor up-time and connectivity with Powershell

Use Powershell to troubleshoot SQL connectivity issues. A way to monitor up-time and connectivity of a SQL server database with some simple Powershell commands.

AT TIME ZONE – a new favourite feature in SQL Server 2016

Rob Farley explains why AT TIME ZONE is his new favourite feature in SQL Server 2016, but also shows that it can make a mess of cardinality estimates.

Byte Me: JavaScripting

Reading the SQL Server log files using TSQL

The SQL Server Error Log is quite large and it's not always easy to view the contents with the Log File Viewer. Greg Robidoux presents an easy way to search and find errors using T-SQL.

Why We Need Backups First

This week Steve Jones notes that backups aren't the most important thing for your data. Restores are.

An Introduction to In-Memory OLTP Database Objects

In-memory OLTP was introduced in SQL Server 2014, but greatly improved in SQL Server 2016. If you have a heavily-used transaction-processing that is processing a lot of data, it is definitely worth considering the new 'In-Memory' features of SQL Server 2016. Grant Fritchey explains why.

Indexing Foreign Keys

Foreign Keys are one of the fundamental characteristics of relational databases and enforce the referential integrity. Is it a good idea to index a FK relationship? When can it help?

Creating PowerShell Stacks and Expression Evaluators

To demonstrate that dynamic modules in PowerShell can be used to easily create objects with methods and properties, Phil Factor implements an expression analyser written in PowerShell, using a variation of Dijstra's Shunting Algorithm.

Data Science Education

Data Science is a hot area and one to which quite a few people would like to move. Steve Jones has some thoughts on trying to get certified in this area.