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.
PowerShell One-Liners: Help, Syntax, Display and Files
Michael Sorens aims to make PowerShell a bit easier to get going with by providing a series of collections of general-purpose one-liners to cover most of what you'll need to get useful scripting done.
XML Workshop : Utilizing Relational Data In XML Files
Have you received an XML file that must be migrated into a production database? Today’s workshop dives into an ad hoc method of processing relational datasets delivered in an XML file format.
Prevent multiple users from running the same SQL Server stored procedure at the same time
There is a stored procedure that must be run by only one user at a time. In this tip, learn how to prevent multiple users from running the stored procedure at the same time.
Open Source the MCM
The MCM certification program has been abandoned by Microsoft. Steve Jones thinks the material can still be useful for the community.
Database Normalization Basics
The task of Database Normalization doesn't have to be painful, especially if you follow Old Mother Celko's Normalization Heuristics.
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