Starting a new year is a good time to assess what skills you need to acquire, and begin planning to accomplish those tasks. For those persons working as a DBA, the options are really cool. Sharepoint continues to be a tool many businesses use. However, because it stores lots of BLOB data, it takes a different kind of management to […]

In preparation for this New Years Day I was reviewing some of our online video with Stephen Wynkoop and Kevin Kline, and was reminded of some of the innovative features released in SQL Server, that, not necessarily being storage engine extensions, are radical in the flexibility we have for managing our data environments. I’m speaking of the hybrid capabilities of […]

The performance of Virtual Servers seem to increase with every release. The base operating systems are better tuned for hosting virtual servers, and the various VS software tools continue to improve in flexibility, manageability, and performance. Combined with a SAN, virtual servers make a great environment for keeping you servers running. I remember when virtual servers first came out for […]

Covering Indexes is a topic I like to return to every once in a while. As we get new readers with less SQL experience this can be a helpful technology to understand. For any relational engine, a covering index is an index that contains all the data necessary to service an SQL statement. Let’s say you have a table with […]

Temporal data is going to be an integrated part of the SQL Server engine as of 2016. What does that mean for you, the consumer, the writer of SQL Queries? It means that you turn on temporal behavior through DDL commands (Data Definition Language) used to define your tables. Then, you use an extension of the DML (Data Manipulation Language) […]

Ok folks…this is really old school. I still use it because it is quick, easy and flexible. The following query may be used to find in any database object containing text you suppl. It checks tables, views, functions and procedures. When I say it checks tables, I mean it checks the definition of a table, not the data contents stored […]

In the holiday tradition of giving, for the year of 2015, I want to share some of the cool things you can do with the SQL Server binary and varbinary data types. You can easily cast just about every other data type into one of the binary data types. Varchar max can be saved in a VarBinary max, etc. Numbers, […]

Today’s topic is one I have never written about. It is about the SQL Server data type SQL_Variant. I haven’t used it because I have always preferred strongly typed data. So, I often stay away from data types like XML or SQL_Variant. Soon, JSON will be added to the mix of undefined data types in the SQL Server family. Regardless […]

Firebase.Io has developed a storage technology providing what I call Event Driven Data. Firebase.io is stored data as JSON objects in a key database. But, it doesn’t stop there. The Firebase.io infrastructure provides not only data storage, but other capabilities not generally associated with a data storage engine. First off, it starts with a web infrastructure with APIs for REST, […]

There are a lot of symptoms that appear when your database hasn’t been normalized according to your needs. Notice I didn’t say it has been normalized to 3rd nrmal form, or boyce-codd normal form, which is a good place to start any database. Usually you will find issues with missing indexes or statistics, or complicated queries. Sometimes you find yourself […]