What, when and who? Auditing 101 - Part 2
In my previous article we discussed Change Tracking which is one of the new technologies introduced by Microsoft. This article will focus on Change Data Capture.
Finding SQL Server views with (or without) a certain property
In this tip Aaron Bertrand uses SQL Server metadata queries to discover SQL Server views that have certain properties or use certain syntax.
Citizen Programmers
Steve Jones finds the Salesforce platform interesting and notes we have lots of "citizen programmers" doing work with data.
Cloud Identities versus Federated Identities in Office 365
Identities, the 'accounts' by which Cloud and Web users identify themselves, are tricky to manage, and tiresome for the users. Cloud services such as Office 365 have their main use in large organisations and so there have to be easy ways for system administrators to maintain them. Microsoft provide three alternative strategies; Cloud identities, Synced identities and federated identities. What is the differences between them, and which should you choose?
SQL Monitor Custom Metric: Excessive Virtual Log Files in Transaction Log
This metric picks up excessive counts of Virtual Log Files (VLF) in a transaction log that can lead to performance problems, including write performance, restore and recovery times. The ideal value for this metric should be less than 25; excessively high values (greater than 50) can cause high write times when writing to the transaction log.
SQL Server Survey
How do you use SQL Server, and how do you expect this to change next year? Fill in our survey, and enter a prize draw to win Amazon vouchers.
Lead and Lag Functions in SQL Server 2012
Arshad Ali discusses how to use CTE and the ranking function to access or query data from previous or subsequent rows. He also shows you how to leverage the LEAD and LAG analytics functions to achieve the same result without writing a self-join query using CTE and ranking function
Holiday Struggles
The sporadic schedule of a day or two a week this holiday season has been a struggle for Steve Jones.
SSRS - Report for Stored Procedure with Multiple Values Passed
You created a report that passed three separate values to a stored procedure, simply enough. However, now the user comes back and they want the ability to select multiple values for the report to return data against. Check out this article for a walk-through on how to handle this request.
The 2014 Tribal Awards - Nominations Open
Nominations open until December 10. The Tribal Awards are back and looking to recognize some of the great contributors to the SQL community. Nominations are now open for 11 different categories, but closing soon so make sure your user group, favorite twitter account, or person who's helped you the most this year is nominated.
Blogs
A New Word: Dolorblindness
By Steve Jones
dolorblindness – n. the frustration that you’ll never be able to understand another person’s...
Claude Code Helps Analyze Test Data Manager Log Files
By Steve Jones
I had a customer ask about analyzing their Test Data Manager (TDM) usage to...
PowerPoint to HTML with Claude AI
By Steve Jones
I had an idea for an animated view of a sales tool, and started...
Forums
Optimism Without Illusion or Why AI Needs Blunt Technologists
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Optimism Without Illusion or Why...
SSIS with VS2022 64/32 issue with Excel files
Hi all, I'm trying to do classic scenario for loading multiple Excel files into...
Case part is sloooooow
Hi So the case statement is slowing this down - but for the life...
Question of the Day
The String Distance I
In SQL Server 2025, what is returned by this code:
SELECT EDIT_DISTANCE('tim', 'tom')
Assume preview features are enabled. See possible answers