Testing in Production
The Apple fall keynote recently didn't work as planned, and it seems as though their systems weren't tested well enough.
Importing Excel Data into SQL Server Via SSIS: Questions You Were Too Shy to Ask
Retrieving data from Excel, and importing it into SQL Server hasn't the same appeal or glamour as, for example, performing heroics with ill-performing queries. This could be why one hesitates before asking questions about how to do it. Rob Sheldon calms your private doubts and fears by answering those embarrassing questions.
SQL Saturday #352 - Sydney
SQL Saturday is coming to Sydney, Australia on October 25, 2014. Join us down under for a free day of SQL Server training and networking. Register while space is available.
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.
Blogs
How to Find Expensive Queries in Amazon Redshift
Slow-running queries can degrade your Redshift cluster’s performance and lead to increased costs. Identifying...
The Notification Trap: How Input Fatigue Is Killing Deep Work in Tech
By gbargsley
If you've been here before, you know this blog is usually about SQL Server,...
Designing a Storage Load Test for SQL Server
I’ve been doing storage load tests for SQL Server for a long time, both...
Forums
How Long is a Long I/O?
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How Long is a Long...
T-SQL Trigonometric Functions in SQL Server
Comments posted to this topic are about the item T-SQL Trigonometric Functions in SQL...
Half of All Engineers
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Half of All Engineers
Question of the Day
How Long is a Long I/O?
In SQL Server 2025, a long I/O is recorded in the error log with message 833. How long much an I/O request be outstanding before this message is written to the log?
See possible answers