Jonathan Hickford Using Migration Scripts in Database Deployments A SQL migration script is similar to a SQL build script, except that it changes a database from one version... 17 June 2014 20 min read
Kalen Delaney Row Versioning Concurrency in SQL Server The optimistic concurrency model assumes that several concurrent transactions can usually complete without interfering with each other, and therefore do... 05 June 2014 44 min read
Joe Celko The SQL of The Game of Life Joe finds a reference to Conway's Game of Life whilst clearing out his desk, and is suddenly gripped with nostalgia.... 05 June 2014 7 min read
Phil Factor On Comparing Tables in SQL Server How do you compare two SQL tables? Every SQL Developer or DBA knows the answer, which is 'it depends'. It... 29 May 2014 20 min read
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
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
Tony Davis 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
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
Robert Sheldon SQL Server Source Control Basics For efficient team-based database development, and reliable and repeatable database deployments, source control is not optional. This book provides just... 01 May 2014 3 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
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
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
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
Simple Talk Editorial Team SQL Server Performance Tuning Using Wait Statistics: A Beginner’s Guide This beginner's guide by Jonathan Kehayias and Erin Stellato covers the basics of using wait statistics; topics include the SQLOS... 01 April 2014 2 min read
Grant Fritchey The DBA Detective: Disturbing Developments Originally one of the articles in the first DBA Team series, Grant wonders what Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett would... 31 March 2014 14 min read
Robert Sheldon 14 SQL Server Indexing Questions You Were Too Shy To Ask One of the first things one needs to understand well about SQL Server is indexes, but somehow many of the... 25 March 2014 22 min read
