Avoiding Database Deployment Disasters – 7 Tips
Here are seven practical tips for any 'accidental DBA' or developer, faced with having to deploy an upgrade to a database live to production, in a development environment that is in the early stages of getting the database code “house in order".
Frustration with Bad Design
It can be frustrating to deal with poorly implemented systems, but Steve Jones notes that you can't take things into your own hands.
Frustration with Bad Design
It can be very easy for technology experts to get frustrated when they see bad design and practices, but you must be careful with how you go about trying to influence change.
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.
Blogs
Monday Monitor Tips: Intelligent Alert Thresholds
By Steve Jones
At the recent Redgate Summit in Chicago, I demo’d (lightly) the ML based Alert...
A New Word: los vidados
By Steve Jones
los vidados – n. the half-remembered acquaintances you knew years ago, who you might...
In-Person CISA Training – April 13-16, 2026
By Brian Kelley
I will be leading an in-person Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) exam prep class...
Forums
String_agg not working as needed
I'm trying to get this string_agg to put all the 'comments' into one result...
Vectors in SQL Server 2025
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Vectors in SQL Server 2025
Odd Sequences
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Odd Sequences
Question of the Day
Odd Sequences
What values are returned from this code?
CREATE SEQUENCE NumericSequence
AS NUMERIC(5,1)
START WITH 1.0
INCREMENT BY 0.1;
GO
SELECT NEXT VALUE FOR NumericSequence
GO
SELECT NEXT VALUE FOR NumericSequence
GO See possible answers