Building a Better Career
It's important that you manage your career and not just leave it to chance. Steve Jones talks about what you might do to ensure that you'll be successful in the IT world.
The Dynamic Process of Loading Data
When loading a data warehouse, handling the ETL process of working with files can be problematic. Longtime DBA Janet Wong brings us an interesting solution that is flexible and efficient for quickly loading a number of files into a warehouse using DTS.
The Weekly Update for Dec 31, 2007
Interviewing, Google as a monopoly, Cumulative Update 5 and more.
Add Custom Data Mining Algorithms to SQL Server 2005
Get a high-level overview of the benefits of the extensibility framework in SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services that allows independent software developers to easily integrate new data mining algorithms into the product.
A Christmas Time Saving Contest for DBAs
We've got a new contest running for the next week just for your production DBAs. Win a prize just for telling us a story.
Row-By-Row Processing Without Cursor
If you are a SQL Server DBA, you realize that the performance of cursors is not great and they should be avoided where possible. One place it is difficult to avoid cursors is individual row processing within a trigger. Amin Sobati brings us a new article that shows just how you can avoid this.
Table Defaults
In working on an existing database, DBAs often look to normalize tables and correct obvious flaws in design. Recently Andy Warren was working on a consulting project and realized that defaults would prevent many issues.
Accessing External Data Sources with Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2005
This white paper covers a variety of client object models supported by Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services when connecting to relational data sources. The example problems and solutions were gathered by members of the Analysis Services team while working with users of Analysis Services.
Data Encryption in SQL Server 2005 – Part I
SQL Server 2005 provides four methods of encryption. Part one of this article covers encryption and decryption by passphrase.
Blogs
Identity Columns Can’t Be Updated: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
I’m not sure I knew identity column values could not be updated. I ran...
Rolling Back a Broken Release
By Steve Jones
We had an interesting discussion about deployments in databases and how you go forward...
A bespoke reporting solution doesn’t have to cost the earth
By ChrisJenkins
You could be tolerating limited reporting because there isn’t an off the shelf solution...
Forums
Can someone please explain what happens?
I have mentioned this several times over several years. Can someone please help me...
SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT) returns null when nothing is found instead of 0
SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT Component) AS Found FROM tblComponents WHERE(Component NOT LIKE '%[a-z]%') AND(LTRIM(RTRIM(Component)) = 'GM13622')...
Remotely Engineer Fabric Lakehouse objects: The Fabric Modern Data Platform
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Remotely Engineer Fabric Lakehouse objects:...
Question of the Day
Creating JSON III
In a SQL Server 2025 table, called Beer, I have this data:
BeerIDBeerName 1Becks 2Fat Tire 3Mac n Jacks 4Alaskan Amber 8KirinI run this code:
SELECT JSON_OBJECTAGG(
BeerID: BeerName )
FROM beer;
What are the results? See possible answers