I was fresh off the boat* from South Africa, working in a small computer store in an equally small town in Saskatchewan. Five days a week in winter, six days a week in summer, mainly… This is how I recovered from a catastrophic failure
Last week we looked at ACID compliance. This week we dive a little deeper into the Isolation portion, and what it all means. Isolation levels work to manage how my transactions may be isolated from… Locks, Blocks, and Isolation Levels
Relational database management systems (RDBMS) such as SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL use transactions to allow concurrent users to select, insert, update, and delete data without affecting everyone else. An RDBMS is considered ACID-compliant… Acids and Databases: A look at ACID and transactions
During a Q&A session I hosted at our local Calgary SQL Server User Group last month, one of the attendees mentioned an interview question he’d had and wanted to hear my thoughts. How would you… What is a good Disaster Recovery Plan?
Today’s public service announcement is a reminder to be wary of date formatting in SQL Server. On a recent mailing list discussion, one person demonstrated the following code (which I’ve adapted for this post): SET… Be Wary of Date Formatting in T-SQL
We can easily spend tens of thousands of dollars on core licences for SQL Server, and then we go and install the product on an operating system with the default Balanced Power Plan, which is,… Balanced Power Saving T-SQL script
The Database Fundamentals series is now done. We started with understanding what a database is, and then spent a little time understanding how databases store text, known as collation. The next step was understanding data… Where To From Fundamentals?
In 2017, there’s no excuse not to have at least a testing environment, and preferably a development environment as well, in order to create and deploy code changes (software, database, you name it) outside of… Why You Need A Test Environment
My First DELETE Statement Here are the links to the previous posts in this series: My First SELECT Statement My First INSERT Statement My First UPDATE Statement This week is a much shorter post, where… How to write a DELETE query
My First UPDATE Statement Last week we covered how to put information into a table using an INSERT statement. This week we will learn how to make changes to data that is already in a… How to write an UPDATE query
My First INSERT Statement Last week we covered how to get information out of a table, using a SELECT query. This week, we will discover some of the myriad ways to put data into a… How to write an INSERT query
My First SELECT Statement Microsoft SQL Server makes it really easy for us to query tables. In SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) for instance, we can right-click on any table we have access to and… How to write a SELECT query
When we want to retrieve information from a database, we query the structure with language appropriate to the database. Remember right at the start of this series we saw that a database could be a… Querying a Database
Version numbers are confusing. SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), the client user interface by which most DBAs access SQL Server, was decoupled from the server product for SQL Server 2016. For the last 18 months… SQL Server Management Studio v17.0
By now you will have heard that the next version of SQL Server has been announced. There’s no release date yet, but Brent Ozar seems to think it’ll be before June. There are many new features,… SQL Server 2017 Announced