The SQLskills Black Friday Super Sale!
Starting at 4pm PST on Thursday, November 28th, SQLskills will be offering our lowest prices ever for our signature Blackbelt bundle with more than 158 hours of top-quality training.
Giving Thanks
My last two months have been packed full of activity. I’ve had the amazing opportunity to be with PostgreSQL friends in New York, Greece, and Seattle. In between, it was a treat to be back in Pittsburgh for the first SQL Saturday since before the pandemic. The strength of the database community at each event […]
Announcing SQL Server 2025
Bob Ward announces the next version of SQL Server, now in private preview.
New SQL Server 2022 Functions
There were a number of T-SQL functions added in SQL Server 2022. Today Steve asks if you are using any of these in your work.
Skipping Columns (& other tricks) Using BCP Format Files (SQL Spackle)
BULK INSERT and BCP are powerful, high performance tools for importing text files. SQL Server MVP Jeff Moden gives us several nifty tips in this introduction to BULK INSERT and BCP Format Files including "Skipping Columns" and the sequestration of bad rows while still loading all the good data.
Transactions
By now, pretty much everyone has heard the stories about the first computers. They were huge, cost a fortune, required incredible amounts of air conditioning, and perhaps more importantly, ran batch jobs submitted on punched cards and magnetic tape. But even before we had these dinosaurs, there were E.A.M (electric accounting machine) units.
Boring or Scripting
There is no shortage of mundane tasks at work. Steve Jones notes that you might not want to depend on those to fill your day in the future.
Should That Be One Update Statement or Multiple?
Let’s say we have a couple of update statements we need to run every 15 minutes in the Stack Overflow database, and we’ve built indexes to support them:
How Do You Patch 100 Database Servers?
The challenges of managing lots of system are significant and there aren't easy solutions, but Steve has a few thoughts on what you can do.
Microsoft SQL announcements at PASS Data Community Summit 2024
Read a summary of the data platform announcements from Microsoft at the PASS Data Community Summit 2024 last week.
Blogs
Five Ways Redshift Serverless Quietly Eats Your Budget
It is Friday, the queries are running, and nobody is watching the bill. That...
A Career of Memories
By Steve Jones
Annabel retired from Redgate Software this week. Across most of my career at Redgate,...
Rethinking Index Maintenance: Why avg_fragmentation_in_percent Is Outdated and What You Should Do Instead
By Tim Radney
As a SQL Server DBA with years of experience tuning production environments, I’ve seen...
Forums
Midjourney, Healthcare?
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Midjourney, Healthcare?
Changes, Happiness, and a Few Tears
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Changes, Happiness, and a Few...
BCP on Linux
Comments posted to this topic are about the item BCP on Linux
Question of the Day
BCP on Linux
When running bcp on Linux, what is the field terminator?
See possible answers