A common database build breaker is data that violates the conditions of any of the CHECK, UNIQUE or FOREIGN KEY constraints, and unique non-clustered indexes, designed to protect the consistency and integrity of your data. Phil Factor explain how to avoid this problem, using SQL Compare and some custom stored procedures to discover which rows will cause violations, and fixing them, before running the build. Read more
Khie Biggs, a software developer on the Data Masker team at Redgate explains how a recent set of Data Masker improvements should make it significantly easier and faster to determine what data needs to be masked, implement a masking plan, and then to apply the masking operation, to protect sensitive and personal data in all the tables and columns of your SQL Server databases. Read more
Stephanie Herr describes the new features in the Deployment Suite for Oracle that will help you automate your database releases safely, on Linux or Windows. Read more
Floating point datatypes accommodate very big numbers but sacrifice precision. They are handy for some types of scientific calculations, but are dangerous when used more widely, because they can introduce big rounding errors. Read more
Phil Factor delves into SQL Prompt's performance rule, PE012, which will advise you if it detects the use of the SET statements within a stored procedure or trigger, which might cause unnecessary recompilations, though the issue extends to other types of batches. Read more
Giorgi Abashidze explains how his team use a 2-phase deployment process with SQL Compare Command line, and some SQL Synonyms, to automate custom deployments for each of their customers, while only needing to maintain one branch per release in source control. Read more
You need to make sure that nobody tampers with your production databases, or really any databases outside Development. Even if you weren't of a nervous disposition, you'd want to know if a database was stopped or removed. You'd also be intrigued by the sudden unrehearsed addition of a database to a production server. Read more
Phil Factor shows uses SQL Clone and PowerShell to automatically create images of all databases on an instance, if they don't already exist, and then create or refresh clones of each one, on all your development servers. Read more
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
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