Phil Factor improves SQL Prompt's built-in ALTER TABLE ADD (ata) snippet so that it enforces certain coding standards, such as specifying whether the column accepts NULL values, and ensuring the new column is well-documented. Read more
SQL Prompt can help prevent the build-up of technical debt in your database code. It alerts the team immediately to issues that might not prevent your code from working as expected, but could eventually cause problems with performance, or maintenance, or even security. Read more
Inherited a database from another team? Changed your team policy on the way that you format SQL? What's to stop you formatting the code of an entire database nicely, when you're developing it? Manually, the process can take longer than you expect. Phil Factor demonstrates a simple 3-step approach to reformatting a whole database , in a single operation, using SQL Compare and SQL Prompt. Read more
Phil Factor shows how to create a table of input values versus expected results, and then use it to unit test your SQL stored procedures and functions and verify that they always produce the correct results. He uses SQL Prompt to make this task much simpler. Read more
This article show how to create a 'baseline' for your Visual Studio SQL Change Automation project, from an existing, target SQL Server database, so that the team can start making changes and easily deploy them to the target database. Read more
This article uses the Spectre/Meltdown bugs as means to demonstrate how you can use a tool like SQL Monitor to assess the impact of patching on the throughput and performance of your SQL Servers. Read more
Phil Factor demonstrates the power of placeholders in SQL Prompt Snippets, for selecting and copying text. They make it very easy to build queries by dragging-and-dropping from the SSMS object explorer, and also to save queries as reusable views or inline table valued functions. Read more
Generating realistic test data is a challenging task, made even more complex if you need to generate that data in different formats, for the different database technologies in use within your organization. Dave Poole proposes a solution that uses SQL Data Generator as a ‘data generation and translation’ tool. Read more
SQL Provision allows users to create copies of SQL Server databases in seconds, using a fraction of disk space, and mask any sensitive data to help address data privacy and protection concerns. It serves as a gateway between production and non-production environments, to ensure the safe distribution of database copies from one central location, without blocking the team's development and release processes. Read more
Generally, you should prevent rowcount messages being sent, by adding a SET NOCOUNT ON at the start of every stored procedure, trigger and dynamically executed batch. Phil Factor demonstrates, and explains the nuances and exceptions. Read more
