Saurabh Dhoble Setting Up Your SQL Server Agent Correctly It is important to set up SQL Server Agent Security on the principles of 'executing with minimum privileges', and ensure... 28 May 2014 15 min read
Randolf Geist Parallel Execution Skew – 12c Hybrid Hash Distribution With Skew Detection Since Parallel Execution Skew is a common problem that can severely limit the scalability of Parallel Execution (see my previous... 19 May 2014 9 min read
Robert Sheldon TSQL User-Defined Functions: Ten Questions You Were Too Shy To Ask SQL Server User-Defined Functions are good to use in most circumstances, but there just a few questions that rarely get... 19 May 2014 31 min read
Joshua Feierman On Adopting the Mindset of an Enterprise DBA Although many of the important tasks a DBA has to perform should be done 'by hand', keying in commands or... 19 May 2014 11 min read
Jonathan Lewis Execution Plans Part 4: Precision and Timing In part 3 of this series we used a simple hash join to introduce the a simple guideline for reading... 14 May 2014 12 min read
Database Administration Tony Davis in Database Administration Optimizing Transaction Log Throughput As a DBA, it is vital to manage transaction log growth explicitly, rather than let SQL Server auto-growth events "manage"... 08 May 2014 35 min read
David Njoku Oracle for Absolute Beginners: Part 6 – Procedures and Functions A wise man once said, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results. If... 07 May 2014 13 min read
Phil Factor Producing JSON Documents from SQL Server queries via TSQL Although SQL Server supports XML well, XML's little cousin JSON gets no love. This is frustrating now that JSON is... 06 May 2014 24 min read
Houri SPM Plan: non reproducibility circumstances and CBO interaction 1. Introduction When a critical report which used to complete very quickly starts performing poorly, there is a big chance... 01 May 2014 17 min read
Dwain Camps The Performance of Traversing a SQL Hierarchy Dwain Camps show that, depending on the size and characteristics of some hierarchical data, six different methods of traversal can... 28 April 2014 16 min read
Jonathan Lewis Execution Plans Part 3: “The Rule” In the first two articles in this series we listed a couple of methods for generating or retrieving execution plans... 25 April 2014 13 min read
Kathi Kellenberger SQL Server Reporting Services Basics: Building SSRS Reports SQL Server Reporting Services is one of the most popular components of SQL Server, but it has always been surprisingly... 25 April 2014 27 min read
Kevin Feasel SQL Injection: How it Works and How to Thwart it This article is an extract from the book Tribal SQL. In this article, Kevin Feasel explains SQL injection attacks, how... 24 April 2014 33 min read
Robert Sheldon SQL Server XML Questions You Were Too Shy To Ask Sometimes, XML seems a bewildering convention that offers solutions to problems that the average database user doesn't have. To make... 22 April 2014 26 min read
Syed Jaffar Hussain How is data security maintained and what’s new in Oracle 12c database security – Part 1 Securing enterprise business-critical data is as important for DBAs as database tuning and data protection. Oracle provides comprehensive and powerful... 16 April 2014 5 min read
Phil Factor Searching for Strings in SQL Server Databases Sometimes, you just want to do a search in a SQL Server database as if you were using a search... 15 April 2014 20 min read
Randolf Geist Parallel Execution Skew – Demonstrating Skew After providing a baseline for Parallel Execution working as expected in the introduction of this series, in this part I’ll... 14 April 2014 8 min read
David Njoku Oracle for Absolute Beginners: Part 5 – PL/SQL A wise man* once said, all software programming is about hoops and loops. You take some variables, give them hoops... 07 April 2014 13 min read
Joe Celko Database Normalization Basics The task of Database Normalization doesn't have to be painful, especially if you follow Old Mother Celko's Normalization Heuristics.… 07 April 2014 20 min read
Phil Factor Continuous Delivery and the Database Continuous Delivery is fairly generally understood to be an effective way of tackling the problems of software delivery and deployment... 03 April 2014 38 min read
