Inception
Inspired by the movie with the same name, Steve Jones has a Friday poll about inspiration and ideas.
Release Testing Is Risk Management Theatre
The adoption of Continuous Delivery often leads to the discovery of suboptimal practices within an organisation, and the Release Testing antipattern is a common example. Steve Smith explores the questions: what is Release Testing, and why is it an example of Risk Management Theatre?
SQL Saturday #374 - Vienna, Austria
SQL Saturday is a full-day technical conference and training event with international speakers. With over 20 sessions on SQL Server and a separate pre-con, the event is aimed at all those interested in SQL Server - from pros to beginners. This event will be on February 28, 2015, so register while space is available.
How does a View work on a Table with a Clustered Columnstore Index ?
This article is about how a view works when it is created on a table with clustered columnstore index on it.
Interrupt Me, I'm Stagnating
Today we have a guest editorial from Andy Warren with a few hints on how you can continue to be proactive as a DBA.
Microsoft Azure Storage Queues Part 3: Security and Performance Tips
After discussion the main concepts and basic API calls for Azure Storage Queues in parts 1 and 2 of this series, Roman Schacherl turns his focus to two topics that no one likes to implement but everybody needs: security and performance.
Stairway to SQL Server Security Level 6: Execution Context and Code Signing
A fundamental way that SQL Server determines whether a principal has the permissions necessary to execute code is with its execution context rules. It’s all complicated by the possibility that a principal has permission to execute code but doesn’t have permission on the underlying objects accessed by the code, such as the data in a table. This stairway level will explore SQL Server’s execution context, ownership chains, and impersonation, as well as show you how you can control access to data via T-SQL code.
Centralize Your Database Monitoring Process
SQL Server Data Collector, together with Management Data Warehouse, is a fine and useful component for gathering information centrally about how SQL Server instances are being used, and thereby keeping an eye out for problems. It comes into its own when you have figured out how to configure it to run on maybe hundreds of instances using Central Management Server. Dennes describes how to tame the system so that it scales.
New SQL Monitor Custom Metric: Number of Unused Indexes
This metric can help if you want to monitor the number of indexes per database that haven't been used for the last month. Indexes that aren't in use should be removed because they can degrade INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE performance, and they use storage space.
Blogs
Automated SQL Server Benchmarking with HammerDB and Docker: A Complete Testing Framework
I’m excited to announce the release of a new open-source project that fully automates...
T-SQL Snapshot Backups on Availability Group Secondary Replicas
One of my favourite features of SQL Server 2022 was the T-SQL Snapshot Backups....
The Book of Redgate: Hours
By Steve Jones
I have said and written this many times: Redgate Software is the type of...
Forums
Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in SQL Server 2025: Fixing the Kitchen-Sink Search Procedure
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in...
AI Experience Gap that we keep talking about
Comments posted to this topic are about the item AI Experience Gap that we...
Question of the Day
ORDER BY alias
There is a table tmp_tab:
CREATE TABLE tmp_tab ( id int, val int );
INSERT INTO tmp_tab VALUES (1, 1), (2, NULL), (3, 3), (4, 4), (5, 5);You want to order the rows ids by the following expression:
ISNULL(val, id) + 1Which of the following queries produces the expected ordering and why? (Select all correct) See possible answers