The Design Investment
How much of an investment should you make in learning design? Steve Jones talks about why we should learn how to do it right.
IT Compliance and Software Development
What is IT Compliance and is it really necessary for contemporary Agile applications to be constrained by the requirements of compliance? William Brewer argues that if the objective is rapid delivery of applications, then compliance controls must be understood as early as possible in development.
Limitations of MongoDb
This article looks at two critical limitations suffered by MongoDb compared with SQL Server.
SQL Server Random Sorted Result Set
In this tip Dallas Snider illustrates how to write a T-SQL query that will return rows sorted randomly.
Don’t Understand? You’re About to Learn Something
Learning opportunities abound, but they can be stressful, as shown in today's guest editorial.
Fifty Words for Databases
Phil wonders whether it is our poor vocabulary about databases that has lead to the failure of developers and Operations people to understand each other on the topic of deployment.
Conrad Wolfram: Geek of the Week
Conrad Wolfram is the 'younger Wolfram' of Wolfram Research, the company behind Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica. He wants to transform the way in which we engage with mathematics. In particular, he would like to reform mathematics education to make greater use of information technology, and he is also leading the way with interactive publishing technology.
How to Design, Build and Test a Dynamic Search Stored Procedure
Learn how to design, build and test a dynamic search SP in just a few simple but methodical steps.
Upgrade and Refresh, or Not?
Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren that looks at the upgrade cycle and how that affects our jobs.
Azure Blob Storage Part 6: Blob Properties, Metadata, etc.
After finding it difficult to find seriously useful information on Azure blob storage written after Storage Client Library 1.7 (and we’re on 4.something now), Robin Shahan decided to try and fill that gap with this article.
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...
Is Fabric a Reliable Service or a Ripped Resource?
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Is Fabric a Reliable Service...
locking down agent for new user on our dev machine
hi , a new user wants to be able to add sql agent jobs...
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