by Mandy Doward - 28/4/2017

Monitoring Logical and Physical Reads & Buffer Cache Usage

Many SQL Server performance problems will come down to poor physical disk performance or inadequate memory resource. This article takes a look at the Buffer Cache and some of the tools that we have for troubleshooting poorly performing SQL Server instances and queries.

Throughout this article we will meet a number of Dynamic Management Views, Functions and System Views:


by Mandy Doward - 22/2/2021

What Is UNIX?

UNIX is a multi-user, multi-tasking Network Operating System.

UNIX was first developed in 1969 by AT&T for a DEC PDP platform and throughout the 80s was ported to many different hardware platforms, made possible through licenses to the source code. AT&T also made their source code available to some US universities, one of which was Berkeley University, and they developed their instances of UNIX.

By the mid 80s there were two main variants of UNIX source code available to computer manufacturers:


by Mandy Doward - 19/4/2017

What Is Linux?

In 1991 Linus Torvalds developed the Linux operating system. Linux is a UNIX look alike operating system, but was a complete rewrite and was not developed from the main System V or BSD source code.

The objective for the Linux operating system was to develop an Open Source operating system. Open source means that the source code is freely available in the public domain. As a result of this there are now a number of variants of Linux including (to name but a few): RedHat, CentOS, Suse, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora.


by Mandy Doward - 22/2/2021

What Is Microsoft SQL Server?

SQL Server is Microsoft's server based Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) providing a robust, reliable  and scalable solution for live OLTP business applications data and historic OLAP reporting and analysis systems.

The PTR SQL Server Training Course Portfolio

Our portfolio of SQL Server training courses caters for all job roles within the data management, development, and data analysis business intelligence areas of interest.


by - 5/5/2019

Using Formula to determine which cells to format

There are many options to choose from when using conditional formatting, however at times we will need to use formula to manipulate our conditions further.


by Mandy Doward - 28/3/2017

Using a SQL Server SELECT Statement to Query an Excel Workbook

Occasionally you may find that some of the data you need to reference in a SQL Server query is located outside of the database in an Excel Workbook.

In this article we look at how you can query an Excel workbook as if it were a table in a SQL Server Database.

The SQL Server OPENROWSET function can be used to connect to a variety of data sources by means of a data provider: 


by Mandy Doward - 8/3/2017

Creating And Working With Tables in Excel

You may think that an Excel Workbook already provides a table of data to you, and in a sense it does, an area consisting of Rows and Columns, with column and row headings and values.

It is, however, possible to create formal Tables from ranges of cells on an Excel worksheet.

Why would we want to do this?

Well, here are a few reasons:


by Mandy Doward - 21/4/2017

Creating A Drop Down Lists For Users to Choose From In Excel

When you design an Excel workbook for users other than yourself to use you may find that it is helpful to provide drop down lists for some column values such as Status Codes, Categories, Response Codes, etc. This is surprisingly easy in Excel and requires no clever VBA code!

In the following example we can see a drop list that a user can choose from when populating a Country column value.


by Mandy Doward - 16/2/2017

SQL Queries to Check Passwords & Privilege Assignments

This article introduces a few SQL queries to gather information about user passwords and privileges and permissions assigned on SQL Server systems.

 


by - 5/5/2019

When writing VBA, there are a number of occasions when you will have to select a single or group of worksheets. In this blog, we will explore some of the ways we can do this.

Selecting a single Worksheet
Selecting all Worksheets
Selecting the last sheet


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