Good and Bad Interview Questions
Are there good and bad interview questions? Are there some you prefer or hate? Steve Jones comments on some of the strange ones out there and how hiring is changing.
Monitoring job history using Reporting Services
Easily monitoring your SQL Agent job history using SSRS for concurrency, job lenght and job status.
Getting Data between Excel and SQL Server using ODBC
With ODBC, you can summarise, and select just the data you need, in an Excel workbook before importing it into SQL Server. You can join data from different areas or worksheets. You can even get data from the result of a SQL Server SELECT statement into an Excel spreadsheet. Phil Factor shows how, and warns of some of the pitfalls.
It's not you; it's us
The announcement that the MCM program was being discontinued brings us a few thoughts from Gail Shaw, one of the 0.08% to achieve the certification.
New Enhanced Column Store Index in SQL Server 2014 – Part 1
Column Store Index, which improves performance of data warehouse queries several folds, was first introduced in SQL Server 2012. Unlike regular indexes or heaps, which store data in B-Tree structure (in row-wise fashion), the column store index stores data in columnar fashion and uses compression aggressively to reduce the disk I/O needed to serve the query request. In this article, Arshad Ali talks about the new enhanced columnstore index feature in SQL Server 2014.
Opportunity for Business Intelligence developer
Red Gate is looking for a Business Intelligence Developer to work with our internal development team on creating business intelligence solutions. You'll be responsible for designing, building, and testing end-to-end BI solutions using the Microsoft BI stack, so we'll expect you to be passionate about understanding data and generating a universe of analytics for your customers – our Red Gaters.
Sensor Data
The availability of cheap sensors brings with it lots of possibilities and concerns. However there is one certainty: more data.
Variable Default Values to a Stored Procedure (SQL Spackle)
A way to assign variable and overrideable defaults to input parameters to an SP or FUNCTION using a configurations table.
New SQL Monitor Custom Metric: Large Transaction Log Files
If the transaction log autogrows rapidly, it can suggest that log backups are not being carried out frequently enough, or another resource may be preventing the log from truncating. This metric measures the number of transaction log files that are greater than 10 GB. The associated alert is raised when the number of files exceeds a specified threshold.
SQL Server Reporting Services Tips and Tricks to Improve the End User Experience
In this article we'll take a look at the following Tips and Tricks for SSRS: Display Total Number of Pages while Navigating, Display Everything in a Single Page, Display Report Parameter Selection, Display No Rows Error Message, Page Settings for Optimal Printing.
Blogs
Why I stopped using MCP for AI coding stuff
By HeyMo0sh
Something has shifted quietly in 2026. The developers I know/respect—the ones actually shipping, not...
AI: Blog a Day – Day 5: Notebooks, Hugging face models and Fine Tuning
By Vinay Thakur
Continuing from Day 4 where we learned Encoder, Decoder, and Attention Mechanism, today we...
AI: Blog a Day – Day 4: Transformers – Encoder, Decoder, and Attention
By Vinay Thakur
Continuing from Day 3 where we covered LLM models open/closed and their parameters, Today...
Forums
Dynamic Unpivot
I have a table I didn't design that has tons of repeating groups in...
Writing as an Art and a Job
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String Similarity II
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Question of the Day
String Similarity II
What is the range for the result from the EDIT_DISTANCE_SIMILARITY() function in SQL Server 2025?
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