External Article

Attack of the predatory sales force

Most skilled professionals—be they butchers, bakers or software makers—take pride in selecting their own tools of the trade. Why is it then that developers and DBAs in large corporations often are not afforded the same professional courtesy or opportunity? The tools they use are just as vital to their livelihood, yet when it comes to high-cost software, developers and DBAs often have no input into what is purchased for their use.

External Article

The identity crisis in replication

This article discusses three common problems DBAs are likely to encounter when columns have the identity property, which is defined as an attribute of int, smallint, bigint, decimal, numeric or tinyint columns that will auto-increment their value when data is inserted. These problems are humorously referred to as the identity crisis.

SQLServerCentral Article

Employee Retention

A SQL Server DBA seems to be a stable job and many of us stick with the same job for an above average length of time. However employee retention in general is important to a strong and healthy company. Steve Jones starts a new series looking at this topic and why an employer might want to worry about retention.

Technical Article

SOA, Multi-Tier Architectures and Logic in the Database

Programmers, webmasters, Web services developers and database administrators (DBAs) are not strangers to the "Can we have it tomorrow?" request. That's why software and web developers have embraced a continuous stream of silver bullet technologies that promised to accelerate development. The developer community has experienced "web time", object-oriented programming (OOP), rapid application development (RAD), "extreme programming" and "agile development". Accelerated development schedules put a premium on understanding architecture and knowing how to match the tools to the job. That means understanding today's model of applications as services and what role a database can play. If you understand SQL technology, for example, you can adapt databases to application and service requirements by embedding logic in a database.

Blogs

Rolling Back a Broken Release

By

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

You could be tolerating limited reporting because there isn’t an off the shelf solution...

Presenting with Visual Studio Code

By

A while back I wrote a quick post on setting up key mappings in...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

Lots of FKs

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Lots of FKs

Real-time On-prem SQL Server Data in Excel – Over the Internet

By Cláudio Tereso

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Real-time On-prem SQL Server Data...

Can You Let Go of Determinism

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Can You Let Go of...

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

Lots of FKs

In SQL Server 2025, what are the most outgoing and incoming FK references a table can have?

See possible answers