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DBA Database

Consuming SQL Agent dates & durations

SQL Agent’s schema is older than me. It handles dates, times, and durations like it’s 1980 by using integers instead of date/time data types. My buddy Aaron Bertrand talks more about Dating Responsibly so that you can have a good datetime with your own …

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Not all stats should be auto-updated

Statistics auto-updates are generally a good thing–auto-update of statistics is the default behavior in SQL Server. Having the freshest information about the data “shape” helps to inform the best selection of an execution plan for queries. Except for when it …

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Code to purge data based on creation date

Yesterday, I talked about batching deletes, and the day before I talked about how much I like to delete data, and why it's necessary to do it, despite being a data pack rat. Today, let's look at just one scenario, and how I like to handle it. In my experience, …

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