Wandering Towards The Lonely Cloud?
Are all RDBMS heading towards "The Cloud"? Is this something we DBAs and consultants should be doing for our client?
SQL Server Hardware Configuration Best Practices
You have been asked to deploy a brand new SQL Server instance. Your management asks you to come up with the best balance of availability, performance and cost for SQL Server. Richard Vantrease has some recommendations.
DBA is too large a concept
Tthe term DBA is too broad and we should strive to institute more granular terms.
SQLSaturday # 286 - Louisville, KY
Join SQL Server MVP Grant Fritchey and other SQL Server professionals for a free day of training and networking at SQL Saturday Louisville, June 21. This is a free event, however there are also two paid-for precons available, run by Grant Fritchey and David Fackler. Register for SQL Sat while space is available.
T-SQL User-Defined Functions: Ten Questions You Were Too Shy To Ask
SQL Server User-Defined Functions are good to use in most circumstances, but there just a few questions that rarely get asked on the forums. It's a shame, because the answers to them tend to clear up some ingrained misconceptions about functions that can lead to problems, particularly with locking and performance
Developing with SQL Server – What must a beginner know?
Lowering the bar for entry does not mean lowering the bar for quality. New to SQL Server? Find out where to start.
Extracting data with headers using PowerShell
This article provides a short PowerShell script to extrace data from a database using PowerShell.
Semi-blocking Transformations in SQL Server Integration Services SSIS
In a SSIS data flow, there are multiple types of transformations. On one hand you have synchronous and asynchronous transformations, but on the other hand you have non-blocking, semi-blocking and fully-blocking components. In this tip, Koen Verbeeck takes a closer look on the performance impact of semi-blocking transformations in SSIS.
Cursor-Killing: Retrieving Recently Modified Data
Cursors are considered by many to be the bane of good T-SQL. What are the best ways to avoid iterative T-SQL and to write queries that look and perform beautifully? In the next part of an ongoing series, we look at ways to efficiently retrieve recently modified data.
IT and the Older Generation
David Poole looks at the interactions of technology across generations in this guest editorial.
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