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.
SQL in the City Workshop - Continuous Integration Stairway
Red Gate’s running a half-day training workshop at their UK head office in Cambridge on Aug 8. It’ll show you how to link your database source control repository to your build system as the starting point for continuous integration.
Calculating and Verifying Check Digits in T-SQL
A lot of numbers that we use everyday such as Bank Card numbers, Identification numbers, and ISBN codes, have check digits. As part of the routine data cleansing of such codes we must check that the code is valid- but do we? Dwain Camps shows how it can be done in SQL in such a way that it could even be used in a constraint, and keep bad data out of the database.
Is Source Control Really That Boring?
The SSC team has put together a little quiz on database source control to go with Rob Richardson, Robert Sheldon, and Tony Davis' new book, SQL Server Source Control Basics. Do you daydream about source control... or daydream to avoid it?
Blogs
Learn about Modern Microsoft Apps in San Diego
By Steve Jones
I wrote about learning today for the editorial: I Can’t Make You Learn. I...
How To Deploy Fabric SQL and Azure SQL Databases with Azure DevOps
By ReviewMyDB
Fabric has CI/CD built in, but if you've tried to use it for database...
A New Word: Attriage
By Steve Jones
attriage – n. the state of having lost all control over how you feel...
Forums
Forward Deployed Engineers
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TRY_PARSE vs TRY_CONVERT in SQL Server: From Basics to Practical Usage
Comments posted to this topic are about the item TRY_PARSE vs TRY_CONVERT in SQL...
DBCC CHECKDB Limits II
Comments posted to this topic are about the item DBCC CHECKDB Limits II
Question of the Day
DBCC CHECKDB Limits II
I have a SQL Server 2025 database that I want to check for corruption every night. One of the things we do is disable indexes used for ETL loads during the weekend and re-enable them on Monday morning. If we run DBCC over the weekend, are our disabled indexes checked for consistency?
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