Positive or Negative
Today Steve Jones wonders if the way you choose to design a database says something about you.
Dependencies and References in SQL Server
It is important for developers and DBAs to be able to determine the interdependencies of any database object. Perhaps you need to work out what process is accessing that view you want to alter, or maybe find out whether that table-type you wish to change is being used. What are all these dependencies? How do you work out which are relevant? Phil Factor explains.
The Dangers of Travel
As data professionals, we might carry lots of information with us that relates to our organization. Will we get caught up in government issues as we cross borders?
The Oracle PL/SQL Results Cache
Oracle offers a results cache in the database (from 11.2 onwards) and in PL/SQL (again, from 11.2 onwards) which can greatly reduce execution time of repeated statements when insert/update/delete activity is not heavy. The mechanism in PL/SQL, however, may not work as expected with global temporary tables. Using a slightly modified example, Jonathan Lewis looks at what you might see when using this option.
An Out of Date CAP
The CAP Theorem talks about the properties of distributed systems, and how you can really only have two of them in any system.
SQL Prompt Tips #2 - Casing Options
A quick tip to help you set your object names to your preferred case in T-SQL code.
Stairway to Advanced T-SQL Level 8: Functions to Generate Date and Time values
When you build applications that store records in SQL Server you will most likely have to store date and time values as part of the data. To manage all the different date related tasks you might need to perform Microsoft has introduced a number of date functions. In this stairway I will be exploring those date and time functions.
Maintaining a grouped running MAX (or MIN)
If you're on SQL Server 2012 or greater, you definitely want to become familiar with all of the extensions to the windowing functions first introduced in SQL Server 2005 – they may give you some pretty serious performance boosts when revisiting code that is still running "the old way." Aaron Bertrand explains.
SQLXML Bulk Loader: The Sequel
SQLXML isn't exactly new technology, and parts of it aren't pretty, but if you need to heave vast quantities of XML data into a SQL Server database then you may come to appreciate the raw speed of which it's capable. Adam Aspin shows how to configure the SQL XML Bulk Loader tool for optimal data loading performance.
Blogs
Advice I Like: Respect
By Steve Jones
“Don’t aim to have others like you; aim to have them respect you.” –...
Blue Sky Programming – The Optimism Trap
Many years ago, before I joined Oracle, I was working on a major modernisation...
Setting Up a Mac for Data Engineering and AI Work
If you work with data pipelines, SQL, notebooks, or machine learning models, a Mac...
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...
locking down agent for new user on our dev machine
hi , a new user wants to be able to add sql agent jobs...
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