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.
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.
Blogs
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...
EightKB 2026
EightKB is back again for 2026! The biggest online SQL Server internals conference is...
Forums
query to track time spent on individual tasks in SSIS
Hi everyone I am looking at building a query to determine how much time...
SQL Server Transactional Replication from Always On Availability Groups to Azure SQL Database
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server Transactional Replication from...
Hidden Heroes
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Hidden Heroes
Question of the Day
Identities and Sequences I
When thinking of the Identity property for auto incrementing columns and sequences for the same action, which are explicitly linked to increment a number in a table when a new row is added?
See possible answers