(Ryan Adams) I learned a hard lesson when I first started as a DBA. Although to be honest, it’s not a lesson I should have had to learn (I’ll keep you in suspense). I work for a large Fortune 100 company and as with many companies our size, there are many processes in IT.

(Arthur Olcot) Just a quick post this time. I had a requirement to convert a small number of UK based postcodes to their latitude/longitude locations so I could use that data within some Tableau dashboards that I’m working on. I had a look around to see what I could find and quickly found both sites

(Kenneth Fisher) For a SQL Server guy it sometimes amazes me how often I’m in and out of batch files and how truly useful they can be. To that end here is all that I can remember about batch files (basically a text file that ends with .bat).

(Pradeep Adiga) Last week I had worked on an issue related to Linked Server. The customer had migrated the SQL Server Instances to Virtual Servers. They had quite a few Linked Servers setup. After migration any Distributed Transaction like the one below across the linked servers would fail immediate

(David Dye) A common question is what is the difference between truncating a table and deleting a table. The short answer is that they both do the same thing, but in different ways. So consider that you have a table that contains 1,000,000 rows and you need to remove all of the rows.

(Koen Verbeeck) The previous tip Simple Text Mining with the SSIS Term Extraction Component introduced us to some simple text analysis using Integration Services (SSIS), the Microsoft ETL-tool included with SQL Server. There the Term Extraction component was presented, which aided us in extracting

(Richard diZerega) The internet is full of interesting (and often free) REST services that expose countless new data sources and operations to client-side applications. A week doesn’t go by where I’m not playing with some new service for a client-side app I’m building.

(Chris) The very first BI tool I used way back in the day was Qlik Desktop. It was an old edition that the company I worked for just had laying around and that the IT department didn’t want to use anymore. After I’d installed it and started getting used to the tool, I realized that I needed to remod

(Kenneth Fisher) I was recently asked where to go in Configuration Manager to change the settings for xp_cmdshell. It was then that I realized that the existence of sp_configure is probably not universal knowledge. I was truly shocked. For some reason I had thought that DBA’s were born with this kno

(Simon Sabin) There are always those problems that you hit and you feel like you are hitting your head against a wall. This was one of those situations.