Alan Cooper helped to debug the most widely-used PC language of the late seventies and early eighties, BASIC-E, and, with Keith Parsons, developed C-BASIC. He then went on to create Tripod, which morphed eventually into Visual Basic in 1991. Alan remains enthusiastic and interested in development with strong views on Agile and Pair Programming.
Dallas Snider explains how to use T-SQL to generate a random password that meets an organization's password requirements.
This metric collects the number of 8-kilobyte pages that make up the plan cache to help identify memory pressure or plan cache pollution. A sudden drop in values for this metric may indicate that the instance is under memory pressure and SQL Server had to reclaim part of the plan cache for other use.
This article explains how default trace can be used for auditing purposes when combined with PowerShell scripts
After answering many forum entries from developers asking for help with dealing with SQL that involved time intervals and ranges, Dwain dreamed of a generalized tool that sets up time slots of various sorts without the need to experiment; that could do the heavy lifting, so that developers could do aggregations and reports based on time intervals without the hard graft. Here is Dwain's dream made reality.
When we write scripts, we often assume many settings will be at some default value. When we generate scripts, that's not the case. Perhaps we should be sure that we always include the settings we expect.
Learn how you can dynamically name a file in SSIS and then send it using the FTP task.
There’s a new kid on the block in the NoSQL world – Azure DocumentDB. Released in preview back in August 2014 and going Generally Available this month, Azure DocumentDB is Microsoft’s initial foray into the increasingly competitive space of non-relational database management systems. Of course there is no better competitor in this space to measure up against than MongoDB. How close does DocumentDB stack up to MongoDB? Are they even close?
This week Steve Jones has a poll on performance tuning code. Since many people aren't experts, the answers this week might help them learn where to focus their efforts.
By Steve Jones
I caught this interesting item over on Pinal Dave’s blog: Eleven Interview Questions that...
By Hemantgiri
I use color-coded connections in SSMS to distinguish Production, Pre-Production, UAT, and Development. But...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Split Large Queries in Athena...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item 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