Stuck in a Rut
What do people do when their job doesn't require a lot of technical skills? Steve Jones has a few thoughts.
Data Mining Part 19: Excel and Data Mining, Samples, Queries
This lesson explains how to Clean Data, Explore Data, get Samples of Data, Classify and query a Data Mining Model.
Data Mining Part 19: Excel and Data Mining, Samples, Queries
This lesson explains how to Clean Data, Explore Data, get Samples of Data, Classify and query a Data Mining Model.
Triple Digits
Salaries for data professionals have risen quite a bit, according to the latest salary survey. That's good for those of us working with SQL Server.
Data Is Crazier than You Think
As a society, we have an unrealistic respect for data, especially if it has a decimal point somewhere and uses metric units. We who are in the business of data need to cultivate a renewed interest in the sceptical and rigorous science of statistics: it is too important to leave to 'Data Scientists'. If the data is wrong, or the way we analyse or report it is misleading, much of what we do is pointless.
SQL Monitor Custom Metric: Average I/O Stalls
This metric is a great general indicator of performance problems. High stall times indicate I/O problems, which can be attributed to busy physical disks or queries that return large data sets to the client.
Dynamically change background color in SSRS reports using custom code
This article demonstrates the use of custom code and cell expressions referencing that custom code to toggle the background color of groups of rows in an SSRS report based upon value-changes in one of the fields.
Managers: who needs them?
Managers, look away now. Patrick Index wants to get something off his chest...
Preparing Your Enterprise for Big Data
Big data applications are now fairly commonplace in large organizations. It is, however, difficult to simply ‘drop’ these applications into an existing IT infrastructure and expect to run smoothly. In addition to energy and cooling requirements for new hardware to support the new big data application, other IT areas need to prepare.
Memory Corruptions, or Why You Need DBCC CHECKDB
DBCC is a mechanism that can protect you against corruptions causing substantial data loss in your database. If you use it.
Blogs
A New Word: los vidados
By Steve Jones
los vidados – n. the half-remembered acquaintances you knew years ago, who you might...
In-Person CISA Training – April 13-16, 2026
By Brian Kelley
I will be leading an in-person Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) exam prep class...
EightKB 2026
EightKB is back again for 2026! The biggest online SQL Server internals conference is...
Forums
query to track time spent on individual tasks in SSIS
Hi everyone I am looking at building a query to determine how much time...
SQL Server Transactional Replication from Always On Availability Groups to Azure SQL Database
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server Transactional Replication from...
Hidden Heroes
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Hidden Heroes
Question of the Day
Identities and Sequences I
When thinking of the Identity property for auto incrementing columns and sequences for the same action, which are explicitly linked to increment a number in a table when a new row is added?
See possible answers