Finding External References in Database Deployments

This article outlines the syntax of the three and four dot references that usually denote external database references, demonstrates how to find them either from a live database or by using a text search of a script, and explains some of the complicating factors that can lead to 'false positives'. Read more

SQL Prompt Safety Net Features for SSMS: Tab Coloring

The Tab Coloring component of SQL Prompt’s SSMS Tab management could save you from accidentally doing something apocalyptic on a production server, ever again. Read more

SQL Prompt Safety Net Features for SSMS: SQL History

Mistakes occasionally happen. Sometimes you accidentally close an SSMS query tab without saving it, before realizing it contained an essential bit of code. Occasionally, you make some ill-judged 'refinements' to working code and now just wish you could rewind your tab back in time an hour and forget the whole sorry episode. Now and again, SSMS just conspires against you and crashes unexpectedly, and you lose all your currently open query tabs, some of which you hadn't saved. SQL History offers a useful safety net in the event of any of these unfortunate events. Read more

Piping, Filtering and Using Flyway Output in PowerShell

Flyway's output is often overwhelmed with verbose messages, most of which we can ignore but some of which provide vital warnings about failed compilations, or useful details about what a migration or callback did. I'll show how to use some pipeline-aware PowerShell functions to filter out and save the bits we want and pass the results along in a form that is useful to the next process in the pipeline. Read more

Finding and Tuning Expensive Stored Procedures using Redgate Monitor

Redgate Monitor's Top procedures list makes it simple to find the procedures having the biggest impact on performance, allowing you to prioritize your tuning efforts, reduce risk and keep pace with the requirements of your growing database estate. Read more

Monitoring Azure SQL Database with Redgate Monitor

Grant Fritchey explains the Azure-tailored metrics and alerts that you need to diagnose performance problems with your Azure SQL Databases, and let you know which resource (CPU, data IO or log IO) is the bottleneck. Read more

Recording What’s Changed when Running Oracle Migrations with Flyway

This article uses Flyway and a PowerShell framework to generate a simple JSON model for each new version of an Oracle database, and then compares models to get a high-level 'narrative' of which tables, views or procedures were changed by each Flyway migration. Read more

Complex Production Database Deployments and Flyway

This article explains how, by use of schemas and stub interfaces, we can use Flyway to manage the main development work smoothly alongside any changes or additions required to maintain production-only code. It also demonstrates how this mechanism enables Flyway to manage a 'mock' or 'dummy' variant of a production schema, in development, so that the team can still develop and test code that, when deployed, will access production-only features. Read more

Undoing Actions on Groups of Database Tables

During development you'll occasionally need an undo script that drops a group of tables, or you might need to truncate a group of tables and then insert fresh data in order to run some tests. Unless you perform the required actions in the correct dependency order, you'll be tripped up by foreign key constraint violations. This article provides a SQL function that returns the list of tables in the correct dependency order. Read more

Getting Started with Flyway Migrations on Oracle

A quick demonstration of using Flyway with Oracle, for those of a nervous disposition. We'll use Flyway to run some migrations on an Oracle Autonomous Database, building the initial version of the database then filling it with development data. Read more