Getting ready for Hadoop
Before adopting Hadoop into your organisation there are a number of factors to consider. This article highlights some of the key points.
SQL Server Heaps, and Their Fragmentation
In SQL Server, heaps are rightly treated with suspicion. Although there are rare cases where they perform well, they are likely to be the cause of poor performance. If a table is likely to have a large number of changes, then it can become fragmented due to way that space is allocated and forward pointers used. How does one detect this problem? Is it significant? How does one deal with it, if necessary? Neeraj Tripathi explains.
Early Adopters
Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren that looks at those that run software early in its lifecycle.
Stairway to T-SQL: Beyond The Basics Level 1: The TOP Clause
The first topic in this stairway will be discussing the TOP clause. The TOP clause allows you to control the number of rows to be returned or affected by a query.
Using SQL Prompt to Accelerate the Top 10 Most Common Database Scripts
There may be some people who enjoy repetitive typing, but Grant Fritchey doesn't. He's always preferred SQL Prompt. The standard snippets suit developers fine but aren't so DBA-oriented, so he set about asking the SQLServerCentral community what they typed in the most, and set about producing a set of DBA snippets with the results.
Shrinking the Budget
Most DBAs don't get involved with budgets at work, but we are affected by them. Steve notes you might want to understand how budgets work.
Installing SQL Server 2016
Greg Larson walks through the GUI installation process for SQL Server 2016 and explore these new installation options.
Webinar: Unit Testing in SQL Server with tSQLt
Join tSQLt developer, Sebastian Meine, and Steve Jones as they answer your questions and show you how to unit test T-SQL code.
Relational By Default
Should we consider the relational model the default and only after having a good reason look at a NoSQL platform? Steve Jones has a few comments.
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