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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 out any extraneous square brackets, in a flash. Read more

Monitoring SQL Server with Splunk and SQL Monitor

Splunk is a search engine for collecting and analyzing all sorts of "machine data", including log data and metrics for SQL Server. SQL Monitor gives you the detailed diagnostic view of all your SQL Server instances, and databases. If you have Splunk to monitor your applications and server infrastructure, and SQL Monitor to help you understand the behavior of a complex database system such as SQL Server, then you have a powerful and capable monitoring tool set. Read more

Deploying Data and Schema Together with SQL Compare or SQL Change Automation

You want to use SQL Compare or SQL Change Automation (SCA) to create or update a database, and at the same time ensure that its data is as you expect. You want to avoid running any additional PowerShell scripting every time you do it, and you want to keep everything in source control, including the data. You just want to keep everything simple. Phil Factor demonstrates how it's done, by generating MERGE scripts from a stored procedure. Read more