My previous article in this series explained why it’s important for a development team to adopt a common standard for formatting SQL code. It also gave a broad overview of the styles and actions within SQL Prompt that can help define and implement that standard. Unfortunately, many teams avoid the topic of a standard code […] Read more
With ten programmers working on the same project, how do you agree on a standard style for formatting SQL code, and then implement it consistently? One way is through draconian rules, meeting after meeting, and the occasional sacrifice of a programmer to put the fear in those who remain. If that doesn’t sound like fun, […] Read more
Over the years, running SQL Server inside a virtual machine has changed from being a bit of a strange and risky idea to being commonplace and offering a range of benefits: more effective distribution of load, more flexible provisioning and allowing additional tiers of redundancy to be put in place. Though these factors are compelling, […] Read more
This article describes a lightweight copy-and-generate approach for making a sanitized version of a production database available to development teams with SQL Clone and SQL Data Generator. We build the latest database version (schema only), then copy into it, from the production database, the data for any tables and columns that don’t require masking. For […] Read more
If you’re a Redgate SQL Backup customer, occasionally you’ll need to convert your SQL Backup (.sqb) files to the native SQL Server backup format (.bak), perhaps to perform native database restores on a server where SQL Backup isn’t installed. This produces a striped backup, because each thread used when making the backup will produce a […] Read more
You can use SQL Doc’s command-line parameters to automate database documentation, but when you try to automate the process of documenting a group of databases on a server, they sometimes don’t give you enough control over your automated job. The GUI does offer far more settings but when you’re running an automated process, you can’t […] Read more
We can use the SQL Compare Pro command line with PowerShell to automate the process of creating a new build script for a version of the database, from the object scripts in the VCS. However, what if we want to include static data in the build? This article describes how to the use the SQL […] Read more
If you have a very large database, up to 64TB in size, SQL Clone will let you copy, or ‘clone’, that database many times, very quickly, making the full database available in multiple SQL Server instances across your development and test environments. And yet in each of these instances, the cloned database takes up only […] Read more
With SQL Clone, I can create multiple copies of my database, for testing, very quickly. First, I create an image of the source database, and then from that image I can create multiple clones. Each copy, or clone, appears to SQL Server as a normal database, and yet occupies a fraction of the disk space […] Read more
To what extent should a team attempt to impose a uniform SQL coding format? It can sometimes seem like a futile task. All programmers have a preferred formatting style, to which they profess an unwavering attachment. Check the code of ten programmers, though, and you will likely discover at least 15 different formats, since few […] Read more
