Triple Digits
Salaries for data professionals have risen quite a bit, according to the latest salary survey. That's good for those of us working with SQL Server.
Data Is Crazier than You Think
As a society, we have an unrealistic respect for data, especially if it has a decimal point somewhere and uses metric units. We who are in the business of data need to cultivate a renewed interest in the sceptical and rigorous science of statistics: it is too important to leave to 'Data Scientists'. If the data is wrong, or the way we analyse or report it is misleading, much of what we do is pointless.
SQL Monitor Custom Metric: Average I/O Stalls
This metric is a great general indicator of performance problems. High stall times indicate I/O problems, which can be attributed to busy physical disks or queries that return large data sets to the client.
Dynamically change background color in SSRS reports using custom code
This article demonstrates the use of custom code and cell expressions referencing that custom code to toggle the background color of groups of rows in an SSRS report based upon value-changes in one of the fields.
Managers: who needs them?
Managers, look away now. Patrick Index wants to get something off his chest...
Preparing Your Enterprise for Big Data
Big data applications are now fairly commonplace in large organizations. It is, however, difficult to simply ‘drop’ these applications into an existing IT infrastructure and expect to run smoothly. In addition to energy and cooling requirements for new hardware to support the new big data application, other IT areas need to prepare.
Memory Corruptions, or Why You Need DBCC CHECKDB
DBCC is a mechanism that can protect you against corruptions causing substantial data loss in your database. If you use it.
The MidnightDBAs release Minion Reindex
The MidnightDBAs have developed a free reindexing solution to help DBAs perform maintenance on their instances. Read about the solution and attend their webinar.
The Role of the Technical Architect in Development
What do Technical Architects (TAs) actually do when in a development role? Are they just senior developers 'pushed upstairs' into a management role? Is there a clear distinction between a TA and a product, or project, manager? In an increasingly automated and joined up development environment, the role is important, varied and wide-ranging; as Grzegorz Strzelecki explains.
Regaining access to SQL server after changing the domain
If you changed your domain and have lost control over the SQL server or have been blocked from logging in , this article talks about it
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