The Vacation Dilemma

Does vacation cause extra stress at your job before or after you leave? Steve Jones asks a poll question this Friday to see how you feel. This editorial was originally published on June 12, 2008. It is being re-run as Steve is traveling.

Registration is open for SQL Relay

SQL Relay is an annual community-run series of SQL Server training events across the UK. SQL Relay will run 8, 1-day conferences over the course of 2 weeks starting June 17th. Speakers from Microsoft, global IT companies, and a host of MVPs, are covering topics on DBA, business intelligence, and development.

Unpack an Integer with SQL Server Recursion

Starting with SQL Server 2005, developers have had recursion available as a T-SQL language feature. This article describes recursion and its SQL Server implementations, complete with examples. It also includes SQL Server functions and a stored procedure that unpacks, or parses, an integer into its multiple-of-two components.

Find the Currently Running Scheduled Job

Ever need to automatically stop a long running job? Ever need to find which named Schedule is the currently running version of your job? There's simple code that'll let you find out.

Flight Data

Travel can be stressful and complicated. As much as computer systems have made things easier, when they fail, your trip can turn awful in a hurry.

Solving Complex T-SQL Problems, Step-By-Step

What should you do if your first, most intuitive solution to a problem ends up scanning the data more than is necessary, resulting in poor performance? Have you missed a new SQL Server feature that can remove inefficiency from your technique? Alternatively, do you need a little help, and some lateral thinking, to open the path to a different approach? Sometimes, the answer is "both".

Natural Data

Can you own data itself or patent it? There's a Supreme Court case dealing with this right now. Steve Jones notes that the outcome could affect our jobs as we deal with more and more data and laws to control data are enacted.

Custom Metrics for Monitoring Database Mirroring

SQL Monitor comes with plenty of metrics, but there are always going to be things that you want to measure that can't be done 'out of the box'. Taking database mirroring as an example, Grant shows that custom metrics can be used to monitor and alert whatever aspect of SQL Server or database that you need.

Using FULL JOINs to Compare Datasets

This article describes a technique of using FULL JOINs to compare two datasets within a numerical tolerance.

SQL Server Central Webinar Series #23: Safeguard your data offsite with SQL Backup Pro

You may already have a great backup and recovery plan. However, if something were to happen to your databases and you needed to restore from your backups, you’d want to be in control, with the ability to access a copy of those backups quickly, restoring them with minimal downtime and minimal fuss.

In this session Grant Fritchey, SQL Server MVP, will discuss the key reasons why you need to have offsite backups, and the advantages of hosted storage. He’ll address some of the fears surrounding cloud backups, and show how offsite backup is made quick and easy with the new ‘backup to hosted storage’ features in SQL Backup Pro 7.3.