The Road To Hell - new article from the DBA Team
Joe Celko & Chris Date guest as the sinister Relational Police in this new DBA Team adventure. Can the DBA Team save another doomed database? Find out.
Getting Started with Hashing in SQL Server
Encryption brings data into a state which cannot be interpreted by anyone who does not have access to the decryption key, password, or certificates. Hashing brings a string of characters of arbitrary size into a usually shorter fixed-length value or key. Here's how to get started using it.
Getting It Right First Time. Almost?
Mistakes happen but how can we minimize them and deal with them whey they do happen?
Linked Server Tribulations In SQL Server
In this article, Thomas chronicles the difficulties of troubleshooting a linked server set up, with helpful tips and an exposé of a Linked Server UI flaw.
Call for Speakers - SQL Saturday Pittsburgh
SQL Saturday #315 in Pittsburgh (Oct 4th) is looking for speakers - if you've got a SQL topic you want to talk about, submit it and you may get to share with your peers.
How to test what a SQL Server application would do in the past or in the future with date and time differences
For date and time based testing, I use what I like to call "mock-time". The mock-time starts at what ever I set it to, but then advances along with the regular system clock. Andy Novick shows how that would work.
SQL Monitor Custom Metric: Schema Modified
This metric creates an alert that will be raised when something is added to the schema, or the existing schema is modified.
A DBA at the Opera
In opera, tragedy or absurdity happens because the characters are incapable of standing back, and making a difficult decision. Instead, at every stage, they just drift towards their fate by taking the easy option. Don't let the same fate befall you, as a DBA.
Technology Wave
The quickness at which technology has and is changing our lives and shaping our culture.
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