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Featured Contents

Joe Celko from SQLServerCentral

Georg Ferdinand Ludwig Philipp Cantor is considered the creator of set theory, and his theories are the basis for the naïve set theory you learned in school. But there are lots of other mathematicians you should know, such as Hilbert, Frege, Russell, Zermelo and Dedekind. They made a lot of contributions, too. Hilbert Hilbert is […]

Ten Reasons your SQL Server Monitoring will Scale

Additional Articles from Redgate

This article explains ten ways that SQL Monitor tackles the problem of scaling out the coverage of a single, lightweight monitoring system, and so allows your teams to maintain the health and performance of larger collections of databases and higher numbers of monitored SQL servers.

DAX financial functions: Depreciation calculations

Additional Articles from SimpleTalk

Business Intelligence Architect, Analysis Services Maestro, and author Bill Pearson continues his series surrounding the DAX financial functions. In this article, he exposes four functions that are popular in the calculation of depreciation and amortization. Those accustomed to these functions within Excel will find the syntax, uses and operation of the functions familiar within the Power BI environment.

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Power BI: Data Model Optimization

Steve Hughes from DataOnWheels

Saving the Day from Delay Part 1 Optimizing your data model can be a daunting task. If you read the intro to this series, you know one of the...

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - T-SQL query to find the list of objects referring Linked Servers

Brahmanand Shukla from SQL Server Carpenter

T-SQL query to find the list of objects referring Linked Servers

Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):
	The Time Zone Range
I've got a variable that I declare like this on SQL Server 2019: declare @date datetime2 I need to assign this value from a string that looks like this: '2020-01-10 16:00:00 -07:00' When I do this, I am concerned that I might lose the time zone value. What value is @date assigned?
Think you know the answer? Click here, and find out if you are right.

Yesterday's Question of the Day (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor)

Re-OPENing a Cursor

I have this data:

RSSFeedID   FeedName
----------- -----------------------------------
1           SQL Server
2           .NET
3           Azure SQL Database
12          Azure SQL Data Warehouse

I now run this code:

DECLARE mycurs CURSOR FOR
SELECT rf.RSSFeedID, rf.FeedName FROM dbo.RSSFeeds AS rf ORDER BY rf.RSSFeedID;
DECLARE
    @id INT
  , @feed VARCHAR(50);
OPEN mycurs;
FETCH NEXT FROM mycurs
INTO
    @id
  , @feed;
FETCH NEXT FROM mycurs
INTO
    @id
  , @feed;
SELECT @id, @feed;
CLOSE mycurs;
OPEN mycurs;
FETCH NEXT FROM mycurs
INTO
    @id
  , @feed;
SELECT @id, @feed;
CLOSE mycurs;
DEALLOCATE mycurs;

What ID is returned by the last (third) SELECT?

Answer: 1

Explanation: When you close a cursor, the resources and locks are released. When you open the cursor again, the command repopulates the cursor with the SELECT used in the definition. Ref:

Discuss this question and answer on the forums

Database Pros Who Need Your Help

Here's a few of the new posts today on the forums. To see more, visit the forums.

SQL Server 2017 - Administration

Exchange Event in SQL Profiler - Hi all. I received a Deadlock Graph and saw that I have Exchange Event in it. I read that it means the problem with parallelism. I have such a query: SELECT * FROM TABLE Account WHERE ID NOT INT (SELECT * FROM TABLE Account WHERE ...) Could this be the reason in the subqueries and […]

Performance - I am assisting with a migration. doing a V to V migration from a legacy environment to the hosted infrastructure. I want to do some baseline testing and wondered if there are some scripts i could run in SQL that i could run on the legacy and on the new environment to compare so I […]

SQL Server 2017 - Development

xp_cmdshell - System Cannot Find the Path Specified - Dear Group: This is my first attempt at using the xp_cmdshell command, but right now, I am trying to run it inside SSMS. We need to create a procedure to unzip files so that we can import the data into our tables. I am trying to use PKWare SecureZip to do this, as I have […]

SQL Server 2016 - Administration

High CPU and plan cache instability - In the past couple of months my SQL Server instance has been experiencing higher than usual CPU usage than before, at times hitting 100% and affecting an application. There have been no recent changes to any SQL Server configurations or options in that time, the OS may have in terms of Patching but that is […]

Statistics issues - Hi All, Looking for some clarifications on UPDATING STATISTICS. In our production env, we have 3 TB database with Auto_create stats option is set to true. Every weekend on Saturday midnight we run update stats with full scan. However, during the mid of the week, application developers keep complaining that few queries are running slow. […]

SQL Server 2016 - Development and T-SQL

Table Elimination In a View - I'm experiencing a situation similar to the overly simplified example provided here CREATE TABLE dbo.Sales ( DateKey INT ,Quantity INT ) INSERT INTO dbo.Sales VALUES ( 20210101 ,5 ) ,( 20210102 ,15 ) ,( 20210103 ,4 ) ,( 20210104 ,8 ) ,( 20210105 ,23 ) ,( 20210106 ,47 ) ,( 20210107 ,31 ) ,( 20210108 […]

Import JSON in SSIS with Column Row Transformed - I’m attempting to modify the code on this SQL Server Central article "Approaches to Import JSON in SSIS (SQL Server 2016+) Part 2" using the methods described under “Using SQL Functionality”. I'm successfully using this with other JSON files formatted in a more standard way. However, the JSON flat file that I’m tasked with bringing […]

Update large table rows within a group - I have a large employee table with lots of columns and versions and one org lookup table also with some versions. I need to update a column org_id in employee table which is all nulls now with no history. An employee can have multiple versions records each with same empid but same or different rc_code. […]

CAST(NULL AS varchar(1)) - Hello All, I have been tasked to improve a very old SQL code we have and first thing I see (may not necessarily be the candidate for performance improvement though) going through the code is many CASE records with CASE WHEN myColumn IS NULL THEN CAST(NULL AS varchar(1)) .... Can one advise why someone would […]

Development - SQL Server 2014

Tuning Complex Procedures - Hello, I was wondering if anyone has written something like this. Basically I am trying to tune some stored procedures and I am looking for a stored procedure or tool that would allow me to run a problematic stored procedure a specified number of iterations and then aggregate results like CPU, Reads, Writes, Etc to […]

SQL Server 2019 - Administration

SSIS jobs - we are actually not using a file logger for our SSIS jobs, the logging is done to the database. File logging is in addition, I was thinking to log them on the same server instead of shared location. Do you see any issues?

SQL Permissions - My understanding is you can't grant access to users with select, View database and view definitions etc. at instance level without any user databases created on it. Please advise?

authgrowth log during rebuil index - Good morning all , Have any idea how I can reduce disk consumption during the reindexing phase I use the IndexOptimize procedure of the olla script

SQL Server 2019 - Development

Better way to flatten meta type data? - I have the following table how would I be able to get a view similar to SELECT [ID], [NAME], [Imaging], [Long Term], [Auto], [Factory], [Central Office], [Pizza] FROM [Some SQL Magic Code]; The best I've come up with is multiple selects with where clauses to create tables and then join all of them. I'm not […]

Analysis Services

SSAS Tabular SSDT DAX Drillthrough Issue - Hello, I've come across a scenario where the drillthrough functionality is not working when multiple dates from a fact table is joined to a single date dimension. If I have a fact table with multiple status dates e.g. Resolved Date, Logged Date and join it to one Date dimension table, one of the relationship would […]

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