How to Handle Calculations Related to fiscal year and quarter
This article describes an easy way to handle calculation based on fiscal year and quarter
Static Code Analysis: a necessary irritation.
There is little doubt that static code analysis can contribute to code quality and deliverability. As an aid to a developer, it seems increasingly essential, but can it ever deliver reliable metrics of code-quality? One shudders at the potential misuse of quality metrics in the wrong hands. My hope is that it remains just an aid to human judgement; and creativity.
Microsoft Azure Cloud Services Part 2: Anatomy of a Cloud Service
In this article, we’ll be focusing on the different ways you can build with a Cloud Service, and what exactly happens in terms of virtual machines when you deploy your application.
Exploring Recursive CTEs by Example
Recursive CTEs can be confusing and scary, so examining some non-standard examples may cast light upon these shadowy demons.
Summer, Summer, Summertime
This Friday Steve Jones has a poll about your summertime activities. What have you done away from work that was memorable?
SQL Monitor Custom Metric: WriteLog Wait Time
During a transaction, data is written to the log cache so that it’s ready to be written to the log file on commit, or can be rolled back if necessary. When the log cache is being flushed to disk, the SQL Server session will wait on the WriteLog wait type. If this happens all the time, it may suggest disk bottlenecks where the transaction log is stored.
Why Put Your Database into Source Control?
Checking program code into source control is a daily ritual for most developers, but versioning database code is less well-understood. Grant Fritchey argues that getting your databases under source control is not only vital for the stability of development and deployment, but it will make your life easier when something does go wrong.
Columnstore Index Changes in SQL Server 2014
SQL Server 2012 introduced columnstore indexes, which can immensely improve the performance of OLAP queries. How were they updated and improved in SQL Server 2014?
Restoring the SQL Server Master Database Even Without a Backup
Many DBAs back up their user databases, but not their system databases. Whatever the reason for the lack of a backup, John Grover explains how to save yourself (mostly) should you ever find yourself with no viable master database and no good backup.
SQL in the City Workshop - Continuous Integration Stairway
Red Gate’s running a half-day training workshop at their UK head office in Cambridge on Aug 8. It’ll show you how to link your database source control repository to your build system as the starting point for continuous integration.
Blogs
Stupid Things I Did With AI: ASCII Art
By Steve Jones
I ran across this article recently (https://www.gatesnotes.com/meet-bill/source-code/reader/microsoft-original-source-code) and it has a great opening piece...
Simple Talks Podcasting in 2026
By Steve Jones
I’m in the UK today, having arrived this morning in London. Hopefully, by this...
SSMS 22 still inserting tabs instead of spaces
I’m not trying to start up a debate whether you should use tabs or...
Forums
Cumulative Update 23 - KB5074819 - Database Mail - No longer working.
Hi there, Has anyone else had any trouble with Database Mail in Cumulative Update...
Script Task execution error with HTTP request
I have a script task that tries to execute a HTTP request, which seems...
SQL Server 2025 Standard Developer Edition
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server 2025 Standard Developer...
Question of the Day
URL Safe or Not?
If I use BASE4_ENCODE() in SQL Server 2025, is the output URL Safe by default?
See possible answers