Check Script
Updated: 2010-06-30 15:10:04
Last month I wrote monthly round up and I was very well received. For the same here it goes this months wrote up for all the SQLAuthority.com blogs. The month started very interesting subject of SQL SERVER – Precision of SMALLDATETIME – A 1 Minute Precision which lead to few datetime related blog posts. I find [...]
I recently received an email that contains a question from one of my readers. I have already replied the answer to his email, but I would still like to bring it to your attention and ask if you think I could have done any better with the example I gave. The question was raised when [...]
I often receive lots of questions regarding how to pass SQL Server Certification exams. I have previously written about the road map over SQL SERVER – Roadmap of Microsoft Certifications – SQL Server Certifications. I have tremendous respect for Microsoft Certification and I enjoy the preparation phase as well as attending the real exam. The [...]
Even those of us who were never good at math can tell that the CPU is outpacing the other system components. Two recent developments are helping to change that equation: SSDs and IMDBs....(read more)
Displaying information on an interactive map really isn’t that hard to do. My friends John & Bronwen have been doing this stuff for ages through their company Soul Solutions , and have done lots of talks about how to do this. They have the ability to take that stuff far beyond what I can, but as it’s a significant aspect of data visualisation, it’s an area in which I like to be fairly fluent. I wrote a blog post last month on how to fetch latitude and longitude values for addresses , which I...(read more)
During the SQL Server Training, I frequently noticed confusion in people in terms of Statistics. Many people have no idea on how Statistics works. There are so many misconceptions with respect to Statistics. I recently had an interesting conversation with one attendee who believed that Statistics only exists on Column if there is an Index [...]
Thank you all for participating in Office 2010 giveaway. After carefully evaluation following user is announced as the winner. The question was as following. Choose best option: With which Microsoft Office Product Powerpivot is associated? Options: 1) PowerPoint 2) Excel 3) Word The answer was suppose to be most creative and informative. Many congratulations to [...]
If you've ever wondered what happens to your queries if you're not conscientious about creating indexes, then Fabiano Amorim has yet another nugget of Execution Plan wisdom for you. The Query Optimizer's solution is to use the Nonclustered Index Spool, and we're about to learn why.
I recently attended a wonderful training session organized by Microsoft on Fast Track Data Warehouse Reference Architectures. If you are regular reader of my blog, you will be well aware of the fact that I am more of the Relational guy than a Business Intelligence professional. I was initially a bit skeptic about this training. [...]
Microsoft has released wonderful tool SQL Server 2008 R2 Best Practices Analyzer. I have previously used this tool and found it quite helpful. Here is the latest version which you can download from MS site. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Best Practices Analyzer However, I received quite a few emails that users are not able [...]
A number of hierarchies and networks are most convenently modelled as binary trees. So what is the best way of representing them in SQL? Joe discards the Nested Set solution in favour of surprisingly efficient solution based on the Binary Heap.
During my most recent travel outside India, I was fortunate enough to meet Bryan Oliver. I have heard a lot about him but never had chance to meet him in person. Just like we all do for someone we never met before, I had already some preconceived notions about him. I assumed that he might [...]
One of the most common problem SQL Server developers face while dealing with XML is related to writing the correct XPath expression to read a specific value from an XML document. I usually get a lot of questions by email, on my blog or in the forums which looks like the following: “I have the [...]
During one of the consulting project, I was asked to prove that the SQL Server is a more economical choice than Oracle. Well, I do not want to start again the battle, which has been clearly won by SQL Server. Summary: SQL Server is a feature-rich and economical choice compared to Oracle. The base product [...]
Today we will be going over a simple but interesting concept. Many a time, I have come across the lack of understanding on how the transactions work in SQL Server. Today we will go over a small but interesting observation. One of my clients had recently invited me to help them out with an interview [...]
SQL Server 2008 R2 is released and have been a stable product since the day it is released. I have not received any complains or rants from any of my customers who has upgraded to this version. The number one request is how one can learn about the new features of SQL Server or how [...]
SQL Server Community is very strong community world-wide. In India SQL is considered as one of the most popular technology. Chennai is the only city in India where there are more than 3 SQL Server MVPs are from. My MVP friends has arranged one of the very first whole day SQL event in India at [...]
Madhivanan (SQL Server MVP) is a real community hero. He is known for his two skills – 1) Help Community and 2) Help Community. I have met him many times and every time I feel if anybody in online world needs help Madhivanan does his best to reach them out and solve problem. His name [...]
This will drop all the clean buffers so we will be able to start again from there. Now, run the following script and check the execution plan of the query. Have you ever wondered what types of data are there in your cache? During SQL Server Trainings, I am usually asked if there is any [...]
SQL Server is very big and it is not possible to know everything in SQL Server but we all keep learning. Recently I was going over the best practices of transactions log and I come across following statement. The log size must be at least twice the size of largest supported DML operation (using uncompressed [...]
Previously, I had written a blog post about SQL SERVER – Shrinking NDF and MDF Files – A Safe Operation. After that, I have written the following blog post that talks about the advantage and disadvantage of Shrinking and why one should not be Shrinking a file SQL SERVER – SHRINKFILE and TRUNCATE Log File [...]
June 11, 2010 was a wonderful day because I attended the very first SQL Server 2008 R2 Launch event held by Microsoft at Mumbai. I traveled to Mumbai from my home town, Ahmedabad. The event was located at one of the best hotels in Mumbai,”The Leela”. SQL Server R2 Launch was an evening event that [...]
I see following question quite common on Twitter or in my email box. “What is Denali?” Denali is code name of SQL Server 2011. Here is the list of the code name of other versions of SQL Server. In 1988, Microsoft released its first version of SQL Server. It was developed jointly by Microsoft and [...]
Earlier I wrote blog post SQL SERVER – Difference Between GETDATE and SYSDATETIME which inspired me to write SQL SERVER – Difference Between DATETIME and DATETIME2. Now earlier two blog post inspired me to write this blog post (and 4 emails and 3 reads from readers). I previously populated DATETIME and DATETIME2 field with SYSDATETIME, [...]
The 14 chapters of "The Art of XSD”, written by MVP Jacob Sebastian, will take the reader step-by–step all the way from the basics of XML Schema design all the way to advanced topics on SQL Server XML Schema Collections. Reviewer Hima Bindu Vejella gives it an 8/10 rating, and gives us an excellent distilled description of what the book has to offer.
Yesterday I have written a very quick blog post on SQL SERVER – Difference Between GETDATE and SYSDATETIME and I got tremendous response for the same. I suggest you read that blog post before continuing with this blog post today. I had asked people to honestly take part and share their view about the above [...]
Sometime something so simple skips our mind. I never knew the difference between GETDATE and SYSDATETIME. I just ran simple query as following and realized the difference. SELECT GETDATE() fn_GetDate, SYSDATETIME() fn_SysDateTime In case of GETDATE the precision is till miliseconds and in case of SYSDATETIME the precision is till nanoseconds. Now the questions is [...]
A few days ago, I received following email from blog reader: “Pinal, We are in an emergency situation. We have a large database of around 80+ GB and its backup is of 50+ GB in size. We need to restore this database ASAP and use it; however, restoring the database takes forever. Do you think [...]
An open source code generation utility with some useful features to generate procedures,class for tables and .net code for procedures automatically.
This blog post is written in response to T-SQL Tuesday hosted by Jorge Segarra (aka SQLChicken). I have been very active using these Merge operations in my development. However, I have found out from my consultancy work and friends that these amazing operations are not utilized by them most of the time. Here is my [...]
This blog post is part 2 of the earlier written article SQL SERVER – Subquery or Join – Various Options – SQL Server Engine knows the Best by Paulo R. Pereira. Paulo has left excellent comment to earlier article once again proving the point that SQL Server Engine is smart enough to figure out the [...]