The Subtle Push to the Cloud
There's a push to the cloud from Microsoft, and Steve Jones has a few thoughts. Have you warmed up to the cloud at all?
Moving from Practice to Production with Test-Driven Development
Test-driven development is often taught using simple examples, such as calculating the scores for a game of ten-pin bowling. Using the same practice effectively on a real code base isn’t as easy. This article covers some of the questions that arise when dealing with larger code bases and changing requirements.
Percentile calculations in DAX
It is not always easy to do what Excel does with PERCENTILE.INC. Learn what formulas to use in this article.
Running With The Red Queen
Trying to take the time to fix sub-par processes has some surprising parallels in nature.
The Danger of Algorithms
What problems occur because of the algorithm chosen to generate data? A new report says that social security numbers in the US can be predicted. Steve Jones has a few warnings about what algoriothms you choose.
Big Data Quality Metrics
This article outlines how to measure resource usage, and use these measurements to develop quality metrics for Big Data applications.
SQL Saturday #308 - Houston, TX
SQLSaturday is a training event for SQL Server professionals and those wanting to learn about SQL Server. This event will be held May 10, 2014. Register while space is available.
About the Size of Things
There have been some noticable failures of big IT projects this week, but are they always a problem?
Oiling the gears for the data dictionary
Documenting the database is always a challenge, and there are many techniques you can use to help all the people on your team understand what all your tables are used for. David Poole brings us an easy way to implement a framework for documentation.
The Reading Poll
This week Steve Jones asks about how important reading is to you, and also about what our digital rights might be in a world where we have connected platforms.
Blogs
AI Helps Me with My Sloppiness
By Steve Jones
I type fairly well. Well, I type fast, but I do wear out a...
WITH clause gets a 26ai boost!
By way of background, a while back I did video called “My New Favourite...
Automatic Index Compaction
By ReviewMyDB
Index maintenance has always meant nightly jobs and a window you have to defend....
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...
How We Handled a Vendor Retry That Loaded Twice in Snowflake
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How We Handled a Vendor...
Cognitive Coverage
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Cognitive Coverage
Question of the Day
Getting the Average
I have this data in the dbo.Commission table in a SQL Server 2022 database.
salesperson commission Brian 12 Brian 16 Andy 7 Andy 14 Andy 21 Steve 20 Steve NULLAll the data is a varchar, and I decide to run this query to get the totals for each salesperson.
SELECT SalesPerson
, AVG(TRY_PARSE(Commission AS int)) AS TotalCommission
FROM commission
GROUP BY SalesPerson
GO
What average commission is calculated for Steve? See possible answers