Posts by
Phil Factor

Phil Factor (real name withheld to protect the guilty), aka Database Mole, has 30 years of experience with database-intensive applications.

Despite having once been shouted at by a furious Bill Gates at an exhibition in the early 1980s, he has remained resolutely anonymous throughout his career.

He is a regular contributor to Simple Talk and SQLServerCentral.

Removing the Square Bracket Decorations with SQL Prompt

If you avoid illegal characters and reserved words in your identifiers, you'll rarely need delimiters. Sadly, SSMS applies square bracket delimiters indiscriminately, as a precaution, when generating build scripts. Phil Factor provides a handy function that adds quoted delimiters only where they are really needed and then sits back and lets SQL Prompt strip... Read more

Phil Factor

28 November 2019

Phil Factor

28 November 2019

SQL Prompt by Keyboard

Phil Factor shares a handy keyboard shortcut diagram that reveals some of the most useful of Prompt's keyboard shortcuts, and a wallchart showing every piece of Prompt functionality, what it does, where to find it in the various menus, and of course its keyboard shortcut. Read more

Phil Factor

24 October 2019

Phil Factor

24 October 2019

SQL Clone PowerShell Scripting: The Basics

Phil Factor demonstrates some simple examples of how to use SQL Clone's PowerShell library to pass objects between cmdlets, and simplify common tasks, such as creating and deploying clones from various images. He then documents the objects and cmdlets, and illustrates their inputs and outputs. Read more

Phil Factor

21 October 2019

Phil Factor

21 October 2019

Unwrapping, Unboxing and Installing SQL Clone

If you are evaluating a tool such as a text editor or spreadsheet, it is easy: you just install it, you run it, you decide whether you need it. Job done. However, a similar 'unboxing' or 'unwrapping' of SQL Clone, and installing across a network, is not so quick and easy. Phil Factor's solution... Read more