The DBA Tax
Are you a DBA tax on your company? Or an asset that's worth the cost. Steve Jones talks about trying to be the latter and not the former.
Time and Space: How to Monitor Drive Space in SQL Server
How to monitor drive space in T-SQL and calculate when your drives will run out of space.
Getting Started with Stretch Database Functionality in SQL Server 2016 - Part 2
Arshad Ali explains and demonstrates the impact of enabling the Stretch database feature on backup and restore operations. He also discusses ways to pause, resume, and disable this feature altogether when not needed.
Documenting Your PowerShell Binary Cmdlets
Whereas it is easy to provide inline documentation for a normal scripted PowerShell cmdlet or function so as to provide comprehensive help at the command-line or IDE, the same isn't true of binary cmdlets written in C#. At last, there is an open-source utility to assist with this that is being actively maintained and updated. At last, binary cmdlets need no longer be the poor cousins of scripted cmdlets in their documentation
Having fun with PARSENAME (SQL Spackle)
PARSENAME is perhaps the most infrequently used built-in documented function in SQL Server. SQL Server Microsoft Certified Master Wayne Sheffield shows why this nifty function ought to be included in your SQL toolbox.
Security Convenience
Security is always a hot topic, and Steve Jones notes that we should be specific when we work with security.
Wherever I Lay My Hat: Release Management in TeamCity with Redgate DLM
Where you have multiple services, applications and databases in your environment, and perhaps with high levels of scrutiny and governance, you'll probably want a Release Management system for deploying database and application code together: You can, alternatively, use a separate Release Management component. But for simpler applications, you can use your existing build system such as TeamCity to deploy changes. Using a database deployment example, Richard Macaskill shows how.
Tracking Professional Athletes
Today Steve Jones looks at the use of tracking sensors to gather spatial data on professional athletes for later analysis.
SQL Server 2016 : Availability Group Enhancements
Aaron Bertrand reveals details about the changes to Availability Groups that will ship in the next major version: SQL Server 2016.
Comparison of SQL Server Serializable and Snapshot isolation levels
Both Serializable and Snapshot isolation levels exclude concurrency issues such as Dirty Reads, Non-repeatable Reads and Phantoms. However the way in which they deal with such issues is quite different. In this article, Sergey Gigoyan explains the main differences between the two.
Blogs
The SUM of Nothing: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
I caught this interesting item over on Pinal Dave’s blog: Eleven Interview Questions that...
How to Move the SSMS Status Bar to the Top and Color-Code SQL Server Connections
By Hemantgiri
I use color-coded connections in SSMS to distinguish Production, Pre-Production, UAT, and Development. But...
Forums
Split Large Queries in Athena with a Simple Modulo Trick
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Split Large Queries in Athena...
Finding Trailing Spaces
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Finding Trailing Spaces
Question of the Day
Finding Trailing Spaces
I have some data in a SQL Server 2025 database. It looks like this for the dbo.Customer table:
CustomerID CustomerName PreferredName 1 Steve Steve 2 Andy Andy 3 Brian Brian 4 Allan Allan 5 Devin Devin 6 Steve Steve 7 Sally SallyI want to detect which names have a single trailing space. The CustomerName is a varchar() and the PreferredName is a CHAR(). Does this query detect the problem rows?
SELECT
CustomerID,
CustomerName,
PreferredName
FROM Customer
WHERE CustomerName <> RTRIM(CustomerName)
OR PreferredName <> RTRIM(PreferredName); See possible answers