Kitchen Culture
Today Andy Warren talks about an employee work item that many of you might not be tasked with.
Linked lists
Learn how you can achieve better performance with linked list instead of a numbering column.
What counts for a DBA: Responsibility
Whose fault is it if a database is hacked and its contents appear on a hacker’s site? Louis Davidson suggests that, regardless of limitations, the DBA always bears some responsibility.
Using the MERGE Statement to Perform an UPSERT
The term UPSERT has been coined to refer to an operation that inserts rows into a table if they don’t exist, otherwise they are updated. To perform the UPSERT operation Microsoft introduced the MERGE statement. Not only does the MERGE statement support the UPSERT concept, but it also supports deleting records. Greg Larsen discusses how to use the MERGE statement to UPDATE, INSERT and DELETE records from a target table.
What, when and who? Auditing 101 - Part 3
Who messed around with my database? Auditing 101. In this article we will take a look at another technique available in SQL 2008 and higher. This new technique is SQL Audit.
SQL Server Analysis Services Attribute Relationships
This tip looks at some of the questions around attribute relationships in SQL Server Analysis Services, including why you need them, how to create them, and the common data sets involved.
GUIDs GUIDs everywhere, but how is my data unique?
After having seen many systems that use GUIDs as the primary key for every table, it is time to say enough is enough.
Questions About T-SQL Transaction Isolation Levels You Were Too Shy to Ask
Every time you access a relational database to make a query, you have an important decision to make: What is the appropriate isolation level for your query? If you get this wrong, the consequences can be serious. Deadlocks, Dirty reads, Non-repeatable reads, or poor performance. We're in luck, because Robert Sheldon once more answers those questions that are awkward to ask in public.
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