The Rich Rewards of Tuning SQL
The next time you are tempted to hammer a performance problem with hardware, why not instead invest that time in hammering and refining your SQL queries? There are rich rewards to be had.
Getting Started with HDInsight - Part 2 - Introduction to Azure HDInsight PowerShell
PowerShell is a very popular and powerful feature in the Microsoft stack. It is extensively used for development, deployment and administration across various ecosystems like SQL Server, SharePoint, Azure Cloud and others. PowerShell cmdlets are available for HDInsight as well and in this tip we will take a look at fundamental aspects of Microsoft Azure PowerShell for HDInsight.
15 Quick Short Interview Questions Useful When Hiring SQL Developers
Here is a useful exam that you can administer in either 10 or 15 minutes, either oral or written, when you interview for hiring permanent or contract workers for jobs in SQL Server development or support. (This is not a test for SQL Data Base Administrators.)
SQL Brainteasers: Guess the Christmas Carol/Song
It's Christmas, so here are some Christmassy-themed songs to guess.
SQL Server Data Aggregation for Data with Different Sampling Rates
In the emerging "Internet of Things", there are multitudes of devices collecting data at differing sampling rates. Integrating this data so the data has a common granularity in time is important to not only allow for accurate analysis and mining, but it will also aid in reducing the amount of data to be stored and processed.
In this tip, we will demonstrate how to use the T-SQL AVG function and GROUP BY clause to transform data collected from two devices sampling at 100Hz and 40Hz to one row per second.
Dealing with the Evil of FMTONLY from SSRS
SSRS continues to use SET FMTONLY ON even though it has many problems. How can we cope?
Practical PowerShell Unit-Testing: Mock Objects
Pester allows you to automate the testing of PowerShell scripts. It can test the output of a function as you develop it by validating simple data (scalars) and arrays, and allows you to focus on the one function you want to test by using 'mocking' to fake all the other functions and Cmdlets.
The Big Database Freeze
When a hospital’s mission-critical database fails at Christmas, disaster for the hospital – and its hapless DBA – seems certain. With less than an hour to spare before catastrophe, can the DBA Team save the day? This is a fictionalized true story.
Blogs
Architecting Zero Downtime Deployments–Day of Data Boston
By Steve Jones
Here are the resources for my talk at Day of Data Boston. Slides –...
The Book of Redgate:A Prehistory
By Steve Jones
I’ve covered the values in a number of previous posts on the Book of...
Evidence-bound: what AgentDBA will and won’t link
By Arun Sirpal
When the evidence names the database, it says so. When it doesn’t, it stops....
Forums
Split Large Queries in Athena with a Simple Modulo Trick
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Split Large Queries in Athena...
Finding Trailing Spaces
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Finding Trailing Spaces
Question of the Day
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