Support The Boss
Providing support for your manager or boss in getting his or her job is a good thing. Steve Jones comments on what benefits you might get and why this could enhance your career.
Unwelcome posts on our forums
As you may have noticed, we have been suffering recently from increased spam posts on the forums. This is something we're currently working to resolve.
My month with Release!
Alex and his team are developing a game about software and some of the people who make it. He looks at how games affected his office culture, what he’s learned about designing games to do more than just be fun, and how his team are hoping to share their passion with the developer community.
Using DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS When Testing Performance
Over the years I've had many discussions with other SQL Server Database Administrators as to whether or not you should have the database buffer pool loaded with data pages or empty when testing queries for performance. This tip will take a look at the effects on query performance for both cases by using the DBCC DROPCLEANBUFFERS statement to empty the buffer pool.
Data Mining Introduction Part 9: Microsoft Linear Regression
This is an introduction to the SQL Server Microsoft Linear Regression Algorithm.
Data Mining Introduction Part 9: Microsoft Linear Regression
This is an introduction to the SQL Server Microsoft Linear Regression Algorithm.
Go to a User Group
Are you in a rut? Feeling a bit bored at work writing the same ole code? Or perhaps you need a job and only wish you could be bored "at work"!
PowerShell One-Liners: Accessing, Handling and Writing Data
In the grand finale to Michael Sorens' series of PowerShell one-liners, we come to the handling of data, reading it in and writing it out, whether by files; input/output streams or a database. It shows how it can be done in a variety of formats including CSV, JSON, and XML.
Cloud Storage Security: Are You Doing Your Part?
If the level cloud storage encryption are so high, then why is the cloud security industry experiencing such distrust?
Automated testing in Microsoft Azure
Matthew Flatt was trying to measure the performance of a tool interacting with Microsoft Azure, and had trouble getting a consistent test. His solution? Run the tests on VMs in Azure, housed in the same data center as the blob storage.
Blogs
A Last Minute Trip to the EU
By Steve Jones
My life has some crazy travel stretches for sure. Between speaking, office visits, customer...
Part 3 of 3: Tuning DiskANN — R, Alpha, L, Beam Width, Recall and Latency
In Part 1, we saw how ‘Vamana’ represents vectors as nodes, connects them with...
Automated SQL Server Benchmarking with HammerDB and Docker: A Complete Testing Framework
I’m excited to announce the release of a new open-source project that fully automates...
Forums
Server-Level Table sizes
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Server-Level Table sizes
Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in SQL Server 2025: Fixing the Kitchen-Sink Search Procedure
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in...
Question of the Day
ORDER BY alias
There is a table tmp_tab:
CREATE TABLE tmp_tab ( id int, val int );
INSERT INTO tmp_tab VALUES (1, 1), (2, NULL), (3, 3), (4, 4), (5, 5);You want to order the rows ids by the following expression:
ISNULL(val, id) + 1Which of the following queries produces the expected ordering and why? (Select all correct) See possible answers