SQL Server Reporting Services CountDistinct and Previous Functions
Scott Murray takes a look at what count function variations and related functions are available in SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS).
Promoting Engineers
It seems that often we promote the best technical people into managerial positions, but is that a good idea? Steve Jones notes that a few people think this is a bad idea and there ought to be a technical career path for IT workers.
ASP.NET Core: A More Realistic Starter Kit
ASP.NET Core is a fascinating platform with many good ideas, but in its present form (RC1)there is a culture shock for experienced ASP.NET developers to experience the effort involved in porting a realistic application. There is an obvious advantage on being able to host an application on any web server, but is this enough to compensate for losing the convenience of an integrated pipeline?
Data Mining Part 39: Azure Machine Learning vs Microsoft Data Mining
In earlier chapters, we talked about the Microsoft Data Mining enemies. We will talk now about Microsoft Azure Machine Learning.
What’s in a name?
When a business does not have an agreed set of definitions for their every day terms slow burning chaos ensues.
STRING_SPLIT() in SQL Server 2016 : Follow-Up #1
Aaron Bertrand follows up on a recent post about the performance of STRING_SPLIT() with a few additional reader-motivated tests.
GUI Enhancement on Instant File Initialization (IFI) in SQL Server 201
Ability to enable Instant File Initialization during the installation of SQL Server 2016.
What Does a DBA Do?
Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren as Steve is away. Andy tries to define what a DBA really does in a way that might make sense to others.
Execute Dynamic SQL commands in SQL Server
In some applications having hard coded SQL statements is not appealing, because of the dynamic nature of the queries being issued against the database server. Because of this sometimes there is a need to dynamically create a SQL statement on the fly and then run that command. This can be done quite simply from the application perspective where the statement is built on the fly whether you are using ASP.NET, ColdFusion or any other programming language. But how do you do this from within a SQL Server stored procedure?
Blogs
Setting Up a Mac for Data Engineering and AI Work
If you work with data pipelines, SQL, notebooks, or machine learning models, a Mac...
Want to look at cloud reporting but not sure what the costs will be?
By ChrisJenkins
Have you been thinking about migrating your reporting to Microsoft Fabric or Snowflake but...
The Joyful Craftsmen and the Revolt BI join forces
The Joyful Craftsmen has become the new owner of Revolt BI. The merger creates...
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...
Is it worth hiring experts for BI implementation?
When your team is spending more time gathering data manually or generating reports in...
SQL Server Enum Implementation: A Single-Row View Strategy for Avoiding Magic Values
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server Enum Implementation: A...
Question of the Day
BIT_COUNT I
In SQL Server 2025, I have a table (dbo.UserPermission) that contains this data:
UserID UserPermissions 15 23 37What is returned when I run this code:
select bit_count(UserPermissions) as PermissionCount from dbo.UserPermission where UserID = 3;See possible answers