Mudita: Joy in the success of others
It is only when you start to take genuine pleasure in other people's successes that you experience the true rewards of being in a leadership position.
Single Quotation Marks in SQL
One of the common problems is dealing with apostrophes in T-SQL. This article examines the challenges of single quotation marks and ends with a short quiz.
Do You Really Need to Tune Big Data Applications?
Big data applications are here to stay. The promise of this technology is the ability to quickly and easily analyze large amounts of data and derive from that analysis changes to customer-facing systems, hopefully at a reasonable cost. So, do these applications really need tuning?
Instant File Initialization
This article describes a way to speed up various file operations performed by SQL Server.
Is It Time To Clear Out Those Quirky Functions?
Phil Factor ponders a cull of some of SQL Server's worst-behaving functions.
Agile 2014, Florida
Agile Alliance is holding a conference July 28 - August 1 in Orlando, Florida. If you're interested in Agile development, whether your initiative is mature or brand new, enterprise-wide or team-centric, you will find the finest knowledge, resources and people at Agile2014. This conference is for Teams, Developers, Managers and Executives. Register while space is available.
The Mindset of the Enterprise DBA: Creating and Applying Standards to Our Work
Although many professions require judgement and skill, they also require the ability to do many repeated standard procedures in a consistent and methodical manner. For DBAs, standardization involves providing and following checklists, notes and instructions so that the results are predictable, correct and easy to maintain.
Microsoft Azure Diagnostics Part 2: Basic Configuration of Azure Cloud Service Diagnostics
Michael Collier takes a look at the key aspects of configuring the diagnostic agent in Microsoft Azure to collect the data you want, and transfer that data to storage on a schedule you define.
Dynamic Management Views: Changes in SQL Server 2014
SQL Server 2014 has a number of new DMVs, and some changes from SQL Server 2012. What are the new views and changes, and how can be useful to you?
Never give up
When facing a problem you aren't sure you can solve, keep working on it and believe in yourself.
Blogs
Advice I Like: Respect
By Steve Jones
“Don’t aim to have others like you; aim to have them respect you.” –...
Blue Sky Programming – The Optimism Trap
Many years ago, before I joined Oracle, I was working on a major modernisation...
Setting Up a Mac for Data Engineering and AI Work
If you work with data pipelines, SQL, notebooks, or machine learning models, a Mac...
Forums
SQL Art, Part 4: Happy 4th of July — A British DBA's Guide to Celebrating a War We Don't Talk About
Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Art, Part 4: Happy...
Is Fabric a Reliable Service or a Ripped Resource?
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Is Fabric a Reliable Service...
locking down agent for new user on our dev machine
hi , a new user wants to be able to add sql agent jobs...
Question of the Day
BIT_COUNT I
In SQL Server 2025, I have a table (dbo.UserPermission) that contains this data:
UserID UserPermissions 15 23 37What is returned when I run this code:
select bit_count(UserPermissions) as PermissionCount from dbo.UserPermission where UserID = 3;See possible answers