Automate Yourself to a Coffee Break
A DBA should be working to automate their tasks, and find time to do things that are really important. Like keeping their coffee cup topped off 🙂
Premature Optimisation
Learning how to tune a system is a bit of science and a bit of an art. Gail Shaw gives some guidelines on when you might want to tune and how to go about it so as not to unnecessarily undertake the effort.
Watson Freemium
IBM has released a free version of its Watson service to help people perform analytics on their data.
Prevent Confidential Data at the Application Layer from getting into SQL Server
In this tip Tim Smith looks at different approaches to stop confidential data from getting into the database.
Hierarchies on Steroids #1: Convert an Adjacency List to Nested Sets
SQL Server MVP Jeff Moden shows us a new very high performance method to convert an "Adjacency List" to “Nested Sets” on a million node hierarchy in less than a minute and 100,000 nodes in just seconds. Not surprisingly, the "steroids" come in a bottle labeled "Tally Table".
No Compelling Reason
Steve Jones wants to know if you have compelling reasons to upgrade or not upgrade this week.
A TDD Journey: 3- Mocks vs. Stubs; Test Frameworks; Assertions; ReSharper Accelerators
Test-Driven Development (TDD) involves the repetition of a very short development cycle that begins with an initially-failing test that defines the required functionality, and ends with producing the minimum amount of code to pass that test, and finally refactoring the new code. Michael Sorens continues his introduction to TDD by implementing the first tests and introducing the topics of Test doubles; Test Runners, Constraints and Assertions.
Data Mining Part 17: Working with Reports
In this chapter, we will learn how to create Data Mining Reports using Reporting Services.
Data Mining Part 17: Working with Reports
In this chapter, we will learn how to create Data Mining Reports using Reporting Services.
The 10 (.5) Commandments for IT Professionals
A list of the commandments, or at least suggestions, that Simon Holzman sees as important for IT professionals.
Blogs
Shifting Mindsets: Why FinOps is Essential for Cloud Efficiency
By HeyMo0sh
As a DevOps practitioner, I’ve always focused on performance, scalability, and automation. But as...
March 2026 SQL Server Security Updates
By Brian Kelley
On Patch Tuesday, in addition to OS and Office security patches, Microsoft also released...
How Fabric Mirroring Transformed with SQL Server 2025
When mirroring was first released for Azure SQL Database, it used Change Data Capture...
Forums
Multiple Deployment Processes
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How to Use sqlpackage to Detect Schema Drift Between Azure SQL Databases
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How to Use sqlpackage to...
Upgrading Admin Queries
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Upgrading Admin Queries
Question of the Day
Upgrading Admin Queries
I have a query from a former DBA that we run on SQL Server 2025 to check on database metadata. This query references sys.sysaltfiles. I want to refactor this code to be more modern. Which DMV should I reference instead?
See possible answers