To randomly order rows, or to return x number of randomly chosen rows, you can use the RAND function inside the SELECT statement. But the RAND function is resolved only once for the entire query, so every row will get same value. You can use an ORDER BY clause to sort the rows by the result from the

By Alexander Chigrik – Should you have problems with Analysis Services, review this troubleshooting checklist to find potential solutions.

(Jerry Hamilton) Be aware of the options available given your skills and experience. Are you an Informix Database Administrator seeing demishing job opportunities? Maybe it would help to learn another database platform like DB2, Oracle or SQL Server. If you’re an Analyst, who has reviewed a lot of c

Greg Larsen continues his series on date/time data with a discussion on Searching for Particular Date Values and Ranges. Learn how to select records from a database table based on values in a DATETIME, or SMALLDATETIME column.

By Martin LaMonica – Microsoft gained ground on its database rivals in 2002, despite a decline in sales for the market as a whole, according to research published Wednesday by Gartner Dataquest. (R)

By Itzik Ben-Gan – This article from SQL Server Magazine presents set-based solutions to identifying trends in sales data.