One of the poor practices that I see so many people doing in code is using SELECT *. This is poor practice because it takes more time to complete for clients, it’s an unnecessary use of resources on the client, server and network, and it can fill the buffer cache with rarely-used data. For... Read more
Working in a large database can be difficult at times. While many of us might learn the meanings and definitions of most objects, it’s easy to forget the exact ways in which some objects work, or what the behavior is in certain calls. This is one place where having tools that assist you like... Read more
SQL Prompt includes a number of snippets by default that can help you quickly write T-SQL code. These are templates of code that users use regularly. One of the more popular snippets is the ‘cdb’ snippet that helps with quickly creating a new database for development work. This can also be used to ensure... Read more
SQL Prompt includes a number of snippets by default that can help you quickly write T-SQL code. These are templates of code that users use regularly. One of the more popular snippets is the “ii” snippet that helps with inserting data into a table. If I type “ii” and hit tab, I quickly get... Read more
One of the great things about SQL Prompt is that it quickly removes the need to use so many keystrokes. That’s helpful and handy, but to become a really efficient T-SQL coder, you’ll want to practice incorporating a few tricks into your routine. Here’s a good one. Often I run into tables and can’t... Read more
As you test your row-level security in various environments, you can use SQL Compare to script out and deploy those changes to other databases. Read more
SQL Compare works with dynamic data masking, detecting the differences in masks across tables and generating the T-SQL you need to deploy your masking configuration to other databases. Read more
Deploying database changes to new environments is a very stressful activity. Many organizations and their employees dread migrating changes to a production database because of the potential for problems or downtime. There are ways to minimize the potential issues and build more reliable deployment processes. In fact, many organizations do this, but they do... Read more
In this post, we take a big step forward in engineering the database development process by looking at Continuous Integration (CI) for your database and the characteristics of a software pipeline that begins to implement a repeatable process. This is the S3 stage, named for, and characterized by, the use of CI. S3 –... Read more
In my last post, I looked at the first stage of our maturity model, the Manual level. In this post we move to the S2 level, which is characterized by the use of a formal Version Control System (VCS) and process. S2 – Automated Version Control Many software development organizations have implemented a VCS... Read more
Steve Jones