SQLServerCentral.com Community Update for June 11, 2025

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Featured Contents

Question of the Day

The Trigger Updated Column(s)

The Voice of the DBA

What Keeps You Employed?

This editorial was originally published o May 24, 2019. It is being re-published as Steve is traveling today.

I get asked this question regularly each year as I start coaching volleyball: "what do you do?" New parents are always interested in what the coach does outside of running their kids around a court. This year, I actually got asked this question a couple weekends ago at the final tournament by a parent that I'd talked to many times, but this was the first time we had an extended conversation. It's always a little funny to explain what I do, since it's a mix of quite a few jobs, most of which are somewhat out or the ordinary.

There was an interesting post from Pamela Mooney recently that reminded me that many of us perform jobs that are a little harder to describe to others. Or maybe we are a bit too literal in how we communicate and struggle to concisely express our job responsibilities. In any case, I like the analogies that Pamela makes to the medical industry where there are many specialties with vastly different skills. It's similar for data professionals, though there are really many less potential specialties. Pamela has a general definition that covers lots of things:

DBAs are the guardians and facilitators of the company’s data.

Guardians covers most of the administrative responsibilities. Protect it with backups and security, ensure it's still there, and more. Facilitator might be more development focused, but availability and performance would certainly fall under this description as well. The more I think about it, the more I think this is a good general description.

One that's not likely to mean much to laymen.

I'm sure most of you have had to answer the question at some point in the past. Thinking about it now, without the pressure to respond in real time, how would you easily describe what you do? What do you say about your job? Perhaps you talk about the parts that you really like, or that things you are proud to do. Maybe you mention the things that annoy you the most.

Let us know today what you respond with, and try to do better than the generic I often give: "I'm a computer guy."

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums

Featured Contents

Stairway to Transaction Log Management in SQL Server, Level 4: Managing the Log in Simple Recovery Mode

Tony Davis from SQLServerCentral.com

Tony describes in more detail the SIMPLE recovery model, and the way it works, its advantages and disadvantages.

Managed Instance Gotchas – Configuration Items

Additional Articles from SimpleTalk

Validate all of your settings and be prepared to make some changes during your migration process. Most of the incompatible options make sense when you think about the purpose of SQL MI – it is controlled by Microsoft. Hardware settings, local file access, high-availability settings, and auditing are configured differently or completely disabled.

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Query Hints and Estimated Plans

Grant Fritchey from The Scary DBA

I’m working on an update to my Query Performance Tuning book for SQL Server 2025 and I found myself wondering, will a query hint be immediately apparent in an...

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - SQL Server Login Types: Knowing the Difference Really Matters

Kevin3NF from Dallas DBAs

If your SQL Server has both SQL and Windows logins and you’re not sure why, you’re not alone. Many IT teams without a dedicated DBA bump into this sooner...

Architecting Power BI Solutions in Microsoft Fabric

Steve Jones - SSC Editor from SQLServerCentral

Business Intelligence (BI) tools like Power BI are used by a wide range of professionals, creating diverse and complex scenarios, and finding the right solution can be daunting, especially when multiple approaches exist for a single use case. The author distills his 17 years of experience on various data platform technologies in this book to walk you through various Power BI usage scenarios.

Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):
	The Trigger Updated Column(s)
In a trigger, I can use UPDATE() or UPDATED_COLUMNS() to determine which columns were changed. For these functions, which one accepts a column name as a parameter?
Think you know the answer? Click here, and find out if you are right.

Yesterday's Question of the Day (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor)

Adding Lots of Dates

The second parameter for the EOMONTH() function is an integer. In June 2025, if I run this code, what is returned?

DECLARE @d DATE = GETDATE() SELECT EOMONTH(@d, 95695)

Answer: An overflow error

Explanation: This is a valid integer, but in June 2025, this returns a date that is greater than 9999-12-31, which is the largest date in SQL Server. Ref:

Discuss this question and answer on the forums

Database Pros Who Need Your Help

Here's a few of the new posts today on the forums. To see more, visit the forums.

SQL Server 2016 - Development and T-SQL

Insert bulk fails when Online Index Rebuild is done - Hi, We are getting issue of Insert bulk failed due to schema change of target table. We had created a job to check if fragmentation of table > 30% then to rebuild index online whilst bulk insert is happening in that table. We have around 3 transaction tables in which bulk insert happens and at […]

SQL Server 2019 - Administration

Urgent, Please Help. Named Instance Question - Hello all, I just installed a new named instance on SQL Server 2019 RTM-CU32. The installation was successful but when I connected to the new named instance, it had all the databases and data from the default instance. I looked at the properties of a couple databases and both instances (default and named) point to […]

Best/easiest way to import an SSIS package... - Folks, Looking for advice on the best way to import a package. I hope I'm in the right location! Apologies if I'm not. I inherited a system (Sql Server 2019) with an existing SSIS package. The installation notes indicate that you have to be on the server using SSMS v18. The installation notes indicate: 1. […]

balancing numa nodes - Can anybody advise on how i go about balancing threads to each node. As you can see from the below screen shot node_id 2 & 3 and 6 & 7 are offline (another query i ran shows them as OFFLINE VISIBLE). This is sql2019 STANDARD so limited to 48 online schedulers which are currently spread […]

Question about updating statistics - We have very large tables in our database, some even more 1 B records, so updating statistics will take many hours. Would it be a good idea to skip those tables that have ratio of modified records to total number of records less than 0.5 percent? That's because number of buckets in statistics histogram is […]

SQL Server 2019 - Development

SSIS raw file conversion - Hi, Does anyone know how to handle a raw data file where some rows contain carriage return characters? The problem is that certain rows, which should be treated as a single line, are being split into multiple lines due to embedded carriage returns in the file. The file was exported using isql from Sybase, not […]

Error converting data type varchar to float - Hi everyone I have a bunch of CSV files that I need to import into SS using BULK INSERT. One file works fine. The other fails. Both have the same setup...there is one column that has no data in it so there is only a column header. I used the logic from the CSV file […]

How to convert this to datetime format? - hi everyone I have a CSV that is storing date as "20180919T201400+0000". I am using BULK INSERT to import the file. How do I convert varchar "20180919T201400+0000" to a datetime format that SS can understand? My attempt: CONVERT(VARCHAR(25),REPLACE(ANNOUNCE_DATETIME,'"',''),126) AS ANNOUNCE_DATETIME Error: Conversion failed when converting date and/or time from character string. Thank you

telephones and sql - hi im pretty sure i could trigger a page on a pager if i had to from t-sql. but triggering a phone call doesnt appear to be as easy. does the community know for sure? perhaps of an approach that doesnt require i bring python , 3rd party software , maybe clr etc into the […]

Problem with CASE statement - Hi Everyone I have used CASE many times but not sure what I am doing wrong here. SS won't accept it. What am I doing wrong? How can I fix it? SQL ALTER PROCEDURE [dbo].[WIP_UpdateEvents] (@FILENAME varchar(200), @RECORD_ADD_DATE datetime) AS DECLARE @FILEPATH VARCHAR(200) SET @FILEPATH = @FILENAME DECLARE @RECORD_ADD_DT varchar(26) SET @RECORD_ADD_DT = convert(varchar(26),@RECORD_ADD_DATE,121) DROP […]

Strategies and Ideas

Measure duplicating its value when non-conformed dimension attribute is included - Hi, I have two fact tables (say FactA, and FactB), that are joined/shared by three dimensions (dimA/B/C) in-between the two fact tables (conformed dimensions). Fact A contains a list of finance agreements. FactB contains budgeted sales figures, so we have a figure for each month, for each product, for each sales channel. There is […]

T-SQL

T-SQL - except - add date column - SELECT [A] --,[Date] , ,[C] ,[D] ,[E] FROM [Database].[dbo].[Table] where B < 1000 AND (CheckDate >= getdate()-4 AND CheckDate < getdate()) EXCEPT SELECT [A] […]

T-SQL - except - add date column - .

SQL Server 2022 - Administration

Force Strict Encryption - SQL Agent fails - Hi, On my SQL 2022 (16.0.4195.2) test environment, I tried to enable Force Strict Encryption. To do this: - I generated a certificate using ps script : $newCertificate = New-SelfSignedCertificate -CertStoreLocation cert:\LocalMachine\My -DnsName "DEV-SERVER.domain.local","DEV-SERVER" -FriendlyName "Cert_Test" -KeySpec KeyExchange -Provider "Microsoft RSA SChannel Cryptographic Provider" -TextExtension "2.5.29.37={text}1.3.6.1.5.5.7.3.1" # Convert the report server password to […]

SQL Server 2022 - Development

High Availability Reversed - Force secondary unless failure - Hi I have sql2022 in H/A with a primary and a secondary server. My problem is that I have a query that I need to force it to run the secondary. But I need to point to the listener in case of failover, which is always pointed at the primary. Is there any kinda of […]

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