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. Before showing you methods to calculate these values, it’s probably best to explain what they are. Mean is another name for average. SQL Server has a built-in function to calculate this value.
This is an archive of the posts published to LessThanDot from 2008 to 2018, over a decade of useful content. While we're no longer adding new content, we still receive a lot of visitors and wanted to make sure the content didn't disappear forever.
I just finished another course at school that involved studying an open-source application. I’ve gotten tired of studying Java and using Java tools, so I decided to try studying a .net project. Luckily I stumbled upon NDepend which is the most fully featured tool for studying .net code that I’ve seen to date. In the past when I needed to do some kind of code analysis (usually generating DSM’s and maybe taking a brief look at some metrics), Lutz Roeder’s (I mean red-gate’s) Reflector and its’ various add-ins has been sufficient for me, and not to mention free.
Here we go with the links for week 3 Interpreting Output from SQLIOSIM Kevin Kline has a nice post about interpreting output from SQLIOSIM, he also made a follow up post here: More Tidbits on SQLIOSIM Is Your Internet Activity Hurting Your DBA Career? Brad McGehee has a post cautioning readers that what you do on the internet can come back to haunt you later on Some interesting affects of Table Partitioning
A common mistake DBAs make is overlooking the need to maintain the indexes that ship with system databases. Fragmentation is a concern on user databases but also is something that must be maintained on databases like ReportServer for SSRS. I’m going to focus on SSRS as an example but keep this open to all of the systems databases you have on your instances. Most successful reporting services implementations come with daily report generations, changes and high execution rates.
Chris Shaw posted a new SQL Quiz where he asks: “What are the largest challenges that you have faced in your career and how did you overcome those?” Denny Cherry (@mrdenny on twitter) tagged SQLDenis who tagged George who tagged Ted who then tagged Chrissie (the Great) who then tagged me. For some reason, SQL has always seemed very natural to me, so I tend to run into more problems with front-end languages (and writing blog posts in a timely fashion, apparently!
For all you LiteSpeed users out there Quest released version 5.0.2 late yesterday. There are key features and problems addressed in this release. One of the largest is the recent release had problems with log shipping on standard edition. Another key note: “Advanced Compression was removed from LiteSpeed 5.0.2 to mitigate any possible, future Microsoft support issues with the proprietary format. Any jobs containing the parameter will continue to run successfully, but the engine will ignore the parameter.
Not only in today’s economy but for years developers and system administrators have been pushed into playing the role as a DBA. Why? The answer is simple really. Business is about money and the more you spend the less you make. Being a DBA I know how bad it is to short staff by using one of those roles as a split DBA, but I also understand the business aspects of the decision.
Service Pack 3 for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is now available. SQL Server 2005 service packs are cumulative, and this service pack upgrades all service levels of SQL Server 2005 to SP3. You can use these packages to upgrade any of the following SQL Server 2005 editions: Enterprise Enterprise Evaluation Developer Standard Workgroup Note: To upgrade SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, obtain the SP3 version of Express Edition or Express Edition with Advanced Services.
We all have perfectly normalized tables, with perfectly scrubbed data, right? I wish! Sometimes we are stuck with dirty data in legacy applications. What’s worse is that we are sometimes expected to do interesting things with dirty data. In this blog, I will show you how to extract a number from a varchar column that contains letters and numbers. First, let’s take a look at what some of that data might look like:
Microsoft has released IronPython 2.0 on CodePlex, the .NET implementation of the Python language. IronPython 2.0 is now running on top of the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR). From the release notes: The IronPython and Dynamic Language Runtime teams are proud to announce the release of IronPython 2.0 final. IronPython 2.0 is the culmination of nearly two years worth of work resulting in a CPython 2.5 compatible release on .NET 2.0 SP1.