10 things I learned about rapidly scaling websites with Azure
Troy Hunt takes a look at a website whose traffic literally increased 60-fold overnight. Interesting stuff happens when scale changes that dramatically, so he decided to share a few things he learned.
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".
Blogs
ISACA AI Material/Exam Prep Discount (May 18 – June 30, 2026)
By Brian Kelley
If you are considering any of the ISACA AI certs like the Advanced Artificial...
A Fabric solution can be very cost effective
By ChrisJenkins
Are you currently using Microsoft Fabric or considering migrating to it? If so, there...
Track SQL Server Configuration Changes Using the Error Log
By SQLPals
Track SQL Server Configuration Changes Using the Error Log If you...
Forums
Designing SQL Server ETL Pipelines That Don't Break at Scale
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Designing SQL Server ETL Pipelines...
Detecting Deadlocks Quickly
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Detecting Deadlocks Quickly
SQL Server Showing Out of Space But Plenty of Drive Space
We have a SQL Server installed. We have a 500GB drive for the database....
Question of the Day
Detecting Deadlocks Quickly
In the Database Engine, when a deadlock is detected, what does the detection interval shrink to (in time)?
See possible answers