The Security Payoff
An invitation to hack United's IT systems has resulted in vulnerabilities being found and hackers rewarded for disclosing the issues.
SQL Server Archive and Data Retention Considerations
Tim Smith looks at what to take into consideration before building a design to archive old data in SQL Server databases.
Hiring for Culture
Steve Jones discusses the decision to hire someone that fits in with your culture at work, and what that means.
Stairway to SQL Server Security Level 10: Row-Level Security
Unlike some other industrial-strength database servers, SQL Server lacks a built-in mechanism for protecting individual data records, called row-level security. This stairway level explores why you might want to use such a low-level granularity of data access security and how you can implement row-level security.
Demystifying Oracle's Clustering Factor
One of the more confusing statistics in Oracle is one called the clustering factor. Associated with an index, it's actually dependent on the table data, more specifically the distance between 'jumps' for a given index key. Commonly, a 'jump' is the number of blocks between rows containing the given index key starting with the first block found containing that key. If that sounds confusing don't despair, David Fitzjarrell explains in detail.
Visualizing in Space
An amazing visualization of basketball players has Steve Jones encouraging you to find your own pet project and showcase some skills.
The Importance of Maintenance on MSDB
MSDB is a system database used by SQL Server. MSDB stores all sorts of data, such as backup history, log shipping monitor history, SSIS packages and Service Broker queue data to name a few. Just like user databases, MSDB needs regular maintenance, including index optimizations and, more importantly, regular purging. In this article, Tim Radney looks at how neglecting your MSDB can negatively impact on your environment.
Learning Backup to Azure
References and links to get you started in backing up your database to the Azure blob storage.
No Downtime Deployments
Can you deploy your database changes without any downtime? Steve Jones has a few notes.
What We Want and What We'll Pay For
The challenges of getting enough resources for our projects aren't always apparent.
Blogs
A Career of Memories
By Steve Jones
Annabel retired from Redgate Software this week. Across most of my career at Redgate,...
Rethinking Index Maintenance: Why avg_fragmentation_in_percent Is Outdated and What You Should Do Instead
By Tim Radney
As a SQL Server DBA with years of experience tuning production environments, I’ve seen...
Microsoft Build 2026 announcements
By James Serra
Once again there were a number of Microsoft Build announcements related to data and...
Forums
Changes, Happiness, and a Few Tears
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Changes, Happiness, and a Few...
BCP on Linux
Comments posted to this topic are about the item BCP on Linux
You Probably Don't Need a Vector Database
Comments posted to this topic are about the item You Probably Don't Need a...
Question of the Day
BCP on Linux
When running bcp on Linux, what is the field terminator?
See possible answers