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Question of the Day

Printing Dates

The Voice of the DBA

Thanking the Volunteers

Today we have a guest editorial as Steve is traveling.

In the month of August, I went to three different SQLSaturday events over three weekends. If you’ve never heard of SQLSaturday before, I strongly recommend you check it out. Every one of these events was great in its own way. I just want to take a moment to send a thank you to the organizers.

Putting on a SQLSaturday is not easy. I helped do a couple of them several years ago. It’s a ton of work. From finding a venue, to promoting the event, getting sponsors, roping in speakers, making a schedule, arranging lunch, all of this stuff takes a lot of work. I only did a few of them before I realized, I wasn’t all that crazy about it. Yet, there are people out there who have organized 10 or more of these things. The people who take all this on have a special kind of crazy that we all need to be incredibly thankful for.

What’s more, it’s not just a few people. Every one of these events has a crew of volunteers who step up to carry a part of the burden.

All this work just to set up an environment where it’s possible for individuals who just want to get a little better at their job, maybe step in their career, do a little networking, have the opportunities to do just that. It’s not just SQLSaturdays either. SQLBits, Data Grillen, Data Platform Geeks, these events are doing a ton of work through volunteers and these events make it possible to enhance your career, world-wide.

I just want to take a moment and say thank you to all you mad individuals who make this happen. You may hear a lot of complaints on the day of your event because someone didn’t like a session, or lunch was cold, or, I don’t know, whatever other little issue affected them. However, know this, there are a lot more people out there who are grateful for all that you’ve done and all that you’ve sacrificed than the ones who complain. We may not always say thank you out loud, but know that we really are appreciative in our hearts.

And for those who haven’t said thanks, please, get that done.

Grant Fritchey

Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums

Featured Contents

WorkPlace Encounters: Grappling With ASYNC_NETWORK_IO Waits

Br. Kenneth Igiri from SQLServerCentral.com

An account of a recent encounter we had with a peculiar wait event which was initially misdiagnosed.

Take the 2019 State of Test Data Management survey – you could win a $250 Amazon voucher

Additional Articles from Redgate

We want to hear from you on the approaches you take and the challenges you face when delivering test data to development and testing environments. Take part now for an advance copy of the research and a chance to win a $250 Amazon voucher.

Brent Ozar's DBA Training Plan no.15: What’s Your SQL Server Waiting On?

Additional Articles from Brent Ozar Unlimited Blog

Brent continues his DBA Training Plan: Whenever your queries need to wait on something – storage, locks, memory, whatever – SQL Server tracks what it’s waiting on, and for how long. It’s like you’re seeing INSIDE the server, with all kinds of possible debug points being tracked. All you have to do is ask SQL Server, “What have you been waiting on?”. Here Brent shows you how.

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Quick Blog: Making the Power BI PowerShell cmdlets easier to use

Aaron Nelson from SQLvariant

One of the top reasons I love PowerShell so much is that from the beginning, it was designed to let you, yes you, make it run better for the...

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Interview with Greg Low

damian.widera from Coding Family

This is the sixth interview we have done. This time our guest is Greg Low! I bet you know Greg as he is one of the most recognizable person...

Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):
	Printing Dates
I have a US English, default SQL Server 2017 instance. I have this code: DECLARE @DATE DATETIME SET @DATE ='2019-01-18 20:23:10' PRINT @DATE What would I expect the output to be?
Think you know the answer? Click here, and find out if you are right.

Yesterday's Question of the Day (by Evgeny Garaev)

Stretch Database limitations

What could prevent you from creating a Stretch-enabled table?

Answer: A default constraint on that table

Explanation: You can enable stretch options for tables that have less than 1,023 columns or less than 998 indexes, and with nchar, nvarchar columns. But not one with default constraints and check constraints. Ref: Limitations for Stretch Database - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/stretch-database/limitations-for-stretch-database?view=sql-server-2017

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

SSMS Login Properties can't change default language - Hello, I have a strange problem with my SSMS 18.2. As you can see in the screenshot the default language is set to arabic, despite the default language is set to english. We checked it from another computer. I can't change it to english either. Regards Marcus

SQL Server 2017 - Development

Automate script for SQL Server Database backup - I am writing a script for automating database backup, which is not working properly. Please help me fix this. DECLARE @dateString CHAR(12), @dayStr CHAR(2), @monthStr CHAR(2), @hourStr CHAR(2), @minStr CHAR(2) --month variable IF (SELECT LEN(CAST(MONTH(GETDATE()) AS CHAR(2))))=2 SET @monthSTR=CAST(MONTH(GETDATE()) AS CHAR(2)) ELSE SET @monthSTR= '0' + CAST(MONTH(GETDATE()) AS CHAR(2)) --day variable IF (SELECT LEN(CAST(DAY(GETDATE()) AS CHAR(2))))=2 SET @daySTR=CAST(DAY(GETDATE()) AS CHAR(2)) ELSE SET @daySTR='0' + CAST(DAY(GETDATE()) […]

SQL Server 2016 - Administration

How do we determine if Index fill factor is causing query to run slow? - Hi, I'm troubleshooting a slow running stored procedure and want to know how do we determine if Index fill factor is causing query to run slow?

Log_Reuse_wait_Desc 'AVAILABILITY_REPLICA' - I have a very small DBs (3 GB) but I noticed that the size of the log file grew to be 60 GB. I was going to shrink the log file to be 1 Gb or 2 GB (I know its a bad practice but the log file for this DB doesn't grow this much) […]

adding a computed column and partition scheme - Never mind, I figured it out, I need to persist the computed column in order for things to partition. Actually, the way I did this was to first add the persisted computed column, then dropped the primary key clustered index and made it into a nonclustered, then create the clustered index on the computed column […]

memory not getting released to OS - Hi All, Need help here. Why is sql server is not releasing memory to OS even after lowering the max server memory setting from 61GB to 55GB ? Total RAM 64gb on server. This was onboarded 2 days back. max server memory was not set initially and so it utilized all memory and so we […]

SQL Server 2012 - T-SQL

Duplicate data - Hi Experts . I have table Temp_decimal_mismatch which has duplicate data . The duplicate data is not start forward to remove . Here the row highlighted in yellow is a duplicate . If you see the same data is present in row 1 but in reverse order. I have to get rid rid of the […]

Deduplicate records based on more than one field with different field values - I am currently trying to dedupe a customer table based on both the email and phoneno fields. I can identify where they both have duplicates or where each one has duplicates using code similar to the below. SELECT *, DENSE_RANK() OVER (ORDER BY Email) EmailRank FROM Customer WHERE EMail IN ( SELECT Email FROM Customer […]

SQL Server Newbies

The log file of my user db is full. Please confirm if below resolves issue - Good morning experts, The log file of my user db is full. Could you please confirm if the below resolves the issue: Take log backup->Change the recovery model from full to simple->shrink the log file->Change the recovery model back to full and take an immediate full backup Please let me know otherwise.

SQL Server 2008 High Availability

Will the principal wait for acknowledgement from mirror? - Good Morning Experts, A transaction was sent to mirror database and immediately failover occured. The mode is synchronous .Failover is still in progress. Will the principal wait for acknowledgement from mirror?

I dont want the snapshot to be created for commands that have already been sent - Good Morning experts, I have a publisher db containing thousands of articles to be sent to subscriber. The publisher db is 2TB. There is lot of latency , thousands of undelivered commands in Replication monitor. Some commands (hundreds of them ) have been successfully sent to subscriber. I want to reinitialize the subscriber to resolve […]

SSRS 2016

Date parameter - Hii everyone I am trying to build a report but the date format in the datasource is dd/mm/YY ,the parameter is the Date ,if i fix the date on the dataset it shows an empty report need help please§

Problèmes avec le paramètre Date - Bonjour j'essaie depuis quelque temps d'etablir un rapport sur ssrs mais lorsque je fixe le paramètre Date sur le dataset le rapport obtenu est vide ,je pense avoir un problème au niveau du format j'ai besoin d'aide svp

SQLServerCentral.com Website Issues

Publishing article revision updated intro comment date in article forum - I recently revised an article, https://www.sqlservercentral.com/steps/stairway-to-sqlclr-level-2-sample-stored-procedure-and-function , and just noticed that, in the article-specific forum that was created when the article was first published, the intro post (for all articles, "Comments posted to this topic are about the item...") is no longer the first post. It is currently the last post as it's timestamp is when […]

Drafts of Article Updates showing in original article's "Related content" area - I have an in-progress draft saved for one of my Stairway to SQLCLR articles. I just noticed that at the bottom of the live version of that article, https://www.sqlservercentral.com/steps/stairway-to-sqlclr-level-2-sample-stored-procedure-and-function , in the "Related content" area, it lists the draft version with a link to: https://www.sqlservercentral.com/stairway-to-sqlclr-level-2-sample-stored-procedure-and-function-2 Clicking on that link takes you to an "Ooops, not found" […]

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