Subterranean IL: Exception handling

Today, I’ll be starting a look at the Structured Exception Handling mechanism within the CLR. Exception handling is quite a...

13 January 2011 3 min read

Phil Factor

IsNumeric() Broken? Only up to a point.

In SQL Server, probably the best-known ‘broken’ function is poor ISNUMERIC() . The documentation says ‘ISNUMERIC returns 1 when the...

13 January 2011 4 min read

Wesley David

7 Things that High Availability is Not

Wesley has heard High Availablity touted as all sorts of technological cure-all for busy SysAdmins and DBAs, and now he's...

13 January 2011 8 min read

Fabiano Amorim

Showplan Operator of the Week – Merge Interval

When Fabiano agreed to undertake the epic task of describing each showplan operator, none of us quite predicted the interesting...

11 January 2011 7 min read

Greg Larsen

Which of Your Stored Procedures are Using the Most Resources?

Dynamic Management Views and Functions aren't always easy to understand. However, they are the easiest way of finding out which...

11 January 2011 9 min read

Tony Davis

Head in the Clouds

We’re just past the second anniversary of the launch of Windows Azure. A couple of years’ experience with Azure in...

07 January 2011 3 min read

Robert Sheldon

Data Conversion in SQL Server

Most of the time, you do not have to worry about implicit conversion in SQL expressions, or when assigning a...

06 January 2011 17 min read

Dennis Lloyd

Sebastian Meine

SQL Server Unit Testing with tSQLt

When one considers the amount of time and effort that Unit Testing consumes for the Database Developer, is surprising how...

06 January 2011 11 min read

Michelle Ufford

Effective Clustered Indexes

As a guideline, clustered Indexes should be Narrow, Unique, Static and Ever Increasing (NUSE). Michelle Ufford Explains why. …

06 January 2011 21 min read

Michael Sorens

LINQ Lycanthropy: Transformations into LINQ

LINQ is one of the few technologies that you can start to use without a lot of preliminary learning. Also,...

05 January 2011 27 min read

Jonathan Allen

Getting the right results with bcp and DTS with multiple versions of SQL Server installed.

I was using SSIS for the first time on an instance the other day and came across this error when...

04 January 2011 2 min read

Joe Celko

BIT of a Problem

The BIT data type is an awkward fit for a SQL database. It doesn't have just two values, and it...

04 January 2011 12 min read

Roger Hart

Tron: Legacy, 3D goggles, and embedded UA

The 3D edition of Tron: Legacy opens with embedded user assistance. The film starts with an iconic white-on-black command-prompt message...

21 December 2010 3 min read

Richard Morris

Roland Waddilove: Geek of the Week

A whole generation of British geeks owe a debt of gratitude to Roland Waddilove. He is a journalist with a...

21 December 2010 13 min read

Jonathan Allen

Getting baseline and performance stats – the easy way.

OK, pretty much any DBA worth their salt has read Brent Ozar’s (Blog | Twitter) blog about getting a baseline...

20 December 2010 5 min read

Phil Factor

The Parodist: A SQL Server Application

Every year, we ask Phil Factor to celebrate the holiday season with an article on SQL Server Programming that is...

20 December 2010 18 min read

Brian Donahue

Anatomy of a serialization killer

As I had mentioned last month, I have been working on a project to create an easy-to-use managed debugger. It’s...

19 December 2010 3 min read

Damon Armstrong

Resolving an App-Relative URL without a Page Object Reference

If you’ve worked with ASP.NET before then you’ve almost certainly seen an application-relative URL like ~/SomeFolder/SomePage.aspx. The tilde at the...

19 December 2010 1 min read

Louis Davidson

Design Book–Fourth(last) Section (Physical Abstraction Optimization)

In this last section of the book, we will shift focus to the physical abstraction layer optimization. By this I...

15 December 2010 3 min read