Useful Links
Books
| Delivering Business Intelligence with Microsoft SQL Server 2008, 2nd Edition | Book by Brian Larson |
| Mastering SQL Server 2008 | Book by Michael Lee, Gentry Bieker |
| Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Administrator's Pocket Consultant | Book by William R. Stanek |
| Programming Microsoft SQL Server 2008 | Book by Leonard Lobel, Andrew J. Brust, Stephen Forte (twentysix new york) |
| SQL Server 2005 Administrator's Pocket Consultant | Book by William R. Stanek |
| SQL Server 2005 Bible | Book by Paul Nielsen |
| SQL Server MVP Deep Dives | Book by Adam Machanic, Kim Tripp, Paul Randall |
Business Intelligence
| BI Blog, The [MSDN] | "THE BI Blog is the definitive blog on the BI industry, as told from the perspective of one of its leaders, Microsoft. " |
| BI Thoughts and Theories | "Dealing with Unicode and ASCII Text Files" |
| Business Intelligence Blog, The | This BI blog has a very simple motive. It’s just a BI guy’s enthusiasm to chronicle the exciting period of Business Intelligence technology, as it stands today. So hop on and let’s attempt to blog the next big stride of Business Intelligence. |
| How to install SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services on a Windows Vista-based computer | "This article discusses requirements and steps for installing Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services on a Windows Vista-based computer." |
| Natural Computation for Business Intelligence from Web Usage Mining | Web usage mining attempts to discover useful knowledge from the secondary data obtained from the interactions of the users with the Web. Web usage mining has become very critical for effective Web site management, creating adaptive Web sites, business and |
| No SFTP Task Component in SSIS 2005/2008? No Problem! By Stan Kulp, 2010/05/11 | "There is no SFTP (SSH/TLS-encrypted FTP) Task component in SSIS 2005/2008, but sometimes unencrypted file transfers are not acceptable." |
| Visual Studio for Applications crashes when attempting to debug a .dtsx package | Feedback from Microsoft Connect |
| Web Analytics, Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing | This paper provides an overview of Web Analytics. It describes how Internet communications occur and how those communications are logged. It explains how data from a web server's log can be harvested to generate useful and actionable business intelligen |
MySQL
| Index Analyzer for MySQL | "Information about the Index Analysis Tool for MySQL." |
SimpleTalk Articles
| Contiguous Time Periods | It is always more efficient to maintain referential integrity by using constraints rather than triggers. Sometimes it isn't obvious how to do this. Until a recent idea by Alex Kuznetsov, the history table presented problems for checking data that were dif |
| Data Conversion in SQL Server | Most of the time, you do not have to worry about implicit conversion in SQL expressions, or when assigning a value to a column. Just occasionally, though, you'll find that data gets truncated, queries run slowly, or comparisons just seem plain wrong. Robe |
SQL Community
| Brent Ozar | Too Much Information |
| PASS - The Professional Association for SQL Server | The Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) is an independent, not-for-profit association, dedicated to supporting, educating, and promoting the Microsoft SQL Server community. From local user groups and special interest groups (Virtual Chapters) t |
| PASS Blog Directory | The blogs listed are SQL focused, but may still feature topics that venture into areas and interests besides SQL Server. |
| Rob Farley's Blog Article "SARGable functions in SQL Server" | "SARGable is an adjective in SQL that means that an item can be found using an index (assuming one exists). Understanding SARGability can really impact your ability to have well-performing queries. Incidentally – SARGable is short for Search ARGument Able |
| Solid Quality Mentors Blogs | Solid Quality Mentors is comprised of more than 100 of the world's top technical experts who specialize in assuring client success using integrated Microsoft technologies. Since being founded in 2002, we have become a trusted global provider of advanced |
| SQL and the like - The best things in life are free | Useful article by Dave Ballantyne |
| SQL Server and database administration (DBA) blog by Brad McGehee: | Brad McGehee SQL Server Database Blog, Articles, Tips, Travel Schedule, Presentations |
| SQL Server Blogs - Voices from the UK SQL Server Community | SQLBlogCasts is a free service to those folk who want SQL Server related blogs. It's there to support the online community especially in but not limited to the UK. The site is a partner of the UK SQL Server User Group a group of professionals with an int |
| SQL Server Social Group | We have regular meetings in Cambridge and London. Our aim is to build the SQL Server community in the UK through social meetings where anyone interested in SQL Server can come and share there experiences and learn from other peoples experiences with SQL S |
| sqlPerspectives | "The purpose of this blog will be to walk through the book “SQL Server MVP Deep Dives” chapter by chapter and provide perspectives from the three contributors to the blog plus one guest blogger, on a weekly basis." |
| UK SQL Server User Group | The user group was started in November 1999 by Tony Rogerson to address the need for a UK based community and content site specifically addressing the needs, concerns and asperations of people based in the UK. We have grown ever since through online conte |
SQL Server Links
| Connection Strings | "Forgot that connection string? You will find it right here!" |
| Microsoft SQL Server 2008 | Product overview |
| Problem with valid owner | "Database diagram support objects cannot be installed because this database does not have a valid owner" |
| Run Operating System Commands in SQL Agent using PowerShell | Article by Buck Woody |
| Save (Not Permitted) Dialog Box | "The Save (Not Permitted) dialog box warns you that saving changes is not permitted because the changes you have made require the listed tables to be dropped and re-created." |
| Setting and Changing the Server Collation | "The server collation acts as the default collation for all system databases that are installed with the instance of SQL Server, and also any newly created user databases. The server collation is specified during SQL Server installation" |
| Simple Talk | SQL Server and .Net articles, forums and blogs |
| SQL Server 2005 Waits and Queues | SQL Server 2005 Performance Tuning using the Waits and Queues is a proven methodology that allows one to identify the best opportunities to improve performance, the so called “biggest bang for the buck”. These performance improvements are likely to have a |
| SQL Server Tips, Techniques and Articles | MSSQLTips.com was started and is run by Edgewood Solutions, SQL Server industry experts that saw the need for a different approach to learning about SQL Server. There is plenty of content on the web, but finding content or learning something new about SQ |
| SQL Server TSQL Coding Conventions, Best Practices, and Programming Guidelines | By : Vyas Kondreddi May 10, 2001 |
| SQL Server Version - SQLTeam.com | "I'm continually trying to track down what service packs are installed on various SQL Servers I support. I can never find the right support page on Microsoft's site. So here's an article with all the SQL Server version information I can track down. If you |
| SQLServerPedia | Your community knowledge base |
| Tips for Using SQL Server Performance Monitor Counters | By : Brad McGehee |
SQLServerCentral.com Articles
| Creating a comma-separated list (SQL Spackle) | Learn how to create a comma separated list of values in this short SQL Spackle article by Wayne Sheffield |
| Date Rounding Tactics and the Tiny Devil of SMALLDATETIME | With every new year I think a little bit about time and dates. This posts looks a little more at that in TSQL. |
| SQL Server Index Tuning for Mere Mortals | One of the most important things to measure, monitor, and “get right” for good overall SQL Server OLTP performance is the number and composition of your SQL Server relational indexes. It is extremely important to have neither too many or too few relationa |
| Unexpected View Performance | Views that use implicit conversion to return result sets may use a different query plan than the statement executed in query analyzer. |
Transact SQL
| Calculating Mean, Median and Mode with SQL Server | "Calculating Median and Mode with SQL Server can be frustrating for some developers, but it doesn't have to be. Often times, inexperienced developers will attempt to write this with procedural programming practices, but set based methods do exist." |
| Free online SQL Formatter | "SQLinForm is an automatic SQL code formatter for all major databases including ORACLE, SQL Server, DB2 / UDB, Sybase, Informix, PostgreSQL, Teradata, MySQL, MS Access etc. with over 50 formatting options." |
| How do I concatenate strings from a column into a single row? | "This question is asked quite frequently" |
| ISNULL (Transact-SQL) | Replaces NULL with the specified replacement value. |
| John Huang's Blog - Generating Random Password by a T-SQL Procedure | "To generate a complex password, we should not only get random value from the set of the characters but also guarantee the combination of upper case, lower case, numbers and special characters. In the procedure below, the password generated will include a |
| Password Generator (from http://vyaskn.tripod.com/code/password.txt) | Script to generate a random password |
| REPLACE Multiple Spaces with One | Article from SQLServerCentral, by Jeff Moden, 2009/11/16 |
| SQL Server 2005 Function To Create A Random String | From WebMart Blog |
| SQL String User Function Workbench: Part 2 | "The Return of the Killer Tuples This workbench finishes of what has been a three-part series of string functions. In it, we introduce the idea of using XML to provide a very simple array for doing string handling. This allows us to use functions for sea |
| SQL String User Function Workbench: Part 1 | "In this workbench, we'll show you some fairly simple string User-Functions. Rather than invent the ones we like, we're going to take a different angle and implement the Python string functions, as much as we can. Plenty of examples, and some programming |
| Understanding the TOP WITH TIES clause in SELECT queries | Beginner tip |
Useful Links
| RedGate's .NET Reflector, class browser, analyzer and decompiler for .NET | .NET Reflector is a class browser and analysis tool for .NET, that allows you to navigate, search, disassemble and analyze .NET components. |
| Satellite ITV-1 regions by postcode | ukfree.tv - independent free digital TV advice | "List of each ITV region and the postcode areas that are served by it" |
Web Links
| HTML Character Codes - ISO 8859-1 | "This is the official HTML (and SGML) Character Set." |
| HTML Code converter | The converter transforms the text you type into the standard HTML code that every browser can recognize without altering the character encoding. |
| HTML Special Characters (short list) | - |
| Quick Online Colour Picker Tool | Quick Online Color Picker Tool - HTML Colour - Hex Codes. |
| W3C Markup Validation Service | Check the markup (HTML, XHTML, …) of Web documents |
WordPress
| WordPress on Microsoft SQL Server - Getting Started | "Running WordPress on SQL Server is a piece of cake." |
| WordPress on Microsoft SQL Server | "This site is about helping WordPress users take advantage of Microsoft technology. How, you ask? Yes, it runs WordPress on Windows and SQL Server. Stay tuned for articles about building WordPress plugins, content curation and a whole lot more." |