Louis Davidson 02 April 2020

Implementing Environmental Variable Values in PowerShell

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Blogs

As a relative neophyte to PowerShell (something I will remind readers of every time I start a blog in this series!), I am not always sure I have the best way of doing things. In this blog, I am going to lay a bit of foundation for my job creation system, by building a set … Read more

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Blogs

Louis Davidson 31 March 2020

Using PowerShell to Control Visio

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Blogs

Note: Please be kind on my PowerShell programming techniques. If I am doing something really horrible, let me know. I will change my code. As our team struggles to get to a place where we can do continuous integration, some of the biggest issues we have needed to work on is figuring out how to … Read more

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Blogs

Louis Davidson 27 February 2020

Mixing Relational and Graph DB Objects (Book and Session Prep)

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Graph structures are something that I have lightly covered in my Database Design book in the last few book editions (the last coinciding with SQL Server 2016), implementing them with relational tables. In the next edition of my book that I am starting to write now, my goal will be to cover one of the … Read more

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Louis Davidson 16 January 2020

Speaking at Nashville SQL Saturday this weekend

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Blogs

Boy does time fly, and it is already mid January. The holidays flew by, and now the Christmas tree and (most of) the Christmas décor has been boxed up in the attic (yeah, there is a Santa on a shelf staring at me that he needs to be put up!). The college bowl games are … Read more

2

Blogs

Louis Davidson 01 January 2020

Happy New Year’s Resolutions

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Uncategorized

This has been quite a year, which is why this year’s resolutions are not in October as had been my previous practice. This year for me has been defined by three major things: Knee replacement – Having had one of my hips replaced twice, I figured I had this knocked out cold and would actually … Read more

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Uncategorized

Louis Davidson 10 October 2019

Programmer Gear: Thin Apple Watch Band

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Blogs

This blog is different than my normal T-SQL blogs I almost always do. But I know that I cannot be the only computer programmer who wants to wear a smart watch when working to get some of the health and alert benefits that they can provide. The band though, has always been a blocker to … Read more

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Blogs

Louis Davidson 30 September 2019

The Case of the Vanishing Index Compression

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Blogs

Recently, we started adding compression to some of our larger tables in our data warehouse where columnstore indexes didn’t make sense. (For example, some very large dimension tables, and a few facts where they are not used for large aggregates in the common manner). The changes were checked into source control, we monitored performance, all … Read more

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Blogs

Louis Davidson 25 September 2019

Getting back to normal after a long summer

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Blogs

It has been a fun summer, sort of. 13 weeks ago, I had my left knee replaced to balance out my other two hip replacements on my right side. This is hopefully the last time that Dr Morrison of Southern Joint Replacement Institute ever has to cut into parts of my body with power tools. … Read more

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Blogs

Louis Davidson 16 June 2019

A Father’s Influence

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Blogs

My dad and I had a very interesting and complex relationship. Some of this was due to his complex upbringing. His father was an alcoholic who died fairly early in his life, and his mom, well, his mom liked me a lot, but she was a messed up woman in many ways. After his father … Read more

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Blogs

Louis Davidson 12 June 2019

Building a Great Technical Team

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Editorials

The process of putting together a team of technical people once was largely centered around getting a group of similarly minded people. How people worked was valued more than how well they could accomplish their job. Finding people who could work together smoothly was a big focus when picking new team members, and was a … Read more

3

Editorials

Louis Davidson 05 June 2019

SQL Saturday Virginia Beach this weekend!

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Blogs

Coming up this weekend, I will be in Virginia Beach, VA for their first ever SQL Saturday event. I have strong ties to the area, as the company I work for is located there, and they are helping me out to be able to come in for the event at a more reasonable pace than … Read more

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Blogs

Louis Davidson 01 June 2019

NOT NULL Persisted Computed Columns (And What They Allow)

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Blogs

Ok, so I have been, and will mostly stay, in a bit of blog hibernation. I am super busy trying to finish up a rather large number of tasks (a few chapters in a book, 2 more SQL Saturdays, and as much theme park time as I can get in before the end of June, … Read more

4

Blogs

Louis Davidson 30 April 2019

Speaking at SQL Saturday Jacksonville on May the Fourth

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Blogs

SQL Saturday Jacksonville this weekend! Coming up this weekend, on the least holiest, but still very awesome holiday (May the Fourth), I will be in Jacksonville, Florida delivering a couple of sessions. Now, you might say: “Louis, why would you be travelling on May 4?” Check out the logo for Jacksonville’s event: That’s right, since … Read more

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Blogs

Louis Davidson 05 April 2019

Finding a character in every character string by elimination

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Blogs

A few weeks ago, a coworker had a scenario where he was trying to import a large amount of data into some format (I think it was JSON, but I think it was a special limitation… that isn’t really important to the solution), and it didn’t allow certain characters. Narrowing down what the bad character … Read more

2

Blogs

Louis Davidson 08 March 2019

Discovering Three or Four Part Names in SQL Server Database Code

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Blogs

I am in the middle of a project to enable our corporate databases to work with continuous integration using RedGate SQL Automation (and hopefully get a few blogs/articles out of it too.) One of the things that the tool does is create your database in multiple ways, with multiple names, in order to compare to … Read more

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Blogs

Louis Davidson 27 February 2019

Running a .PS1 or .CMD file from Visual Studio Project Explorer

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Blogs

Today’s blog is one of those topics that I just needed to get written down somewhere, and I expect that a few readers may find this interesting and want to do the same thing. In many of the Visual Studio projects we have where I work, there are Powershell and/or batch CMD files that we … Read more

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Blogs

Louis Davidson 17 February 2019

How To, and Not To, Escape a String In TSQL

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Blogs

You are never too old to learn an important lesson. Like most programmers, I read programming language documentation for one of two reasons. 1. You have just found out about something new 2. You find out that you were wrong about something you thought you had read the first time, probably 10 years ago. Today’s … Read more

7

Blogs

Louis Davidson 14 February 2019

We’re Putting the SQL Band Back Together In Chattanooga

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Blogs

Wow, it has been a while since I last posted, with the holidays, and way too many other projects that I haven’t blogged about just yet because I haven’t found the time. Last June, the SQL Saturday in Chattanooga and SQL Server User Group lost their venue, as well as the leader of the group. … Read more

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Blogs

Louis Davidson 03 January 2019

The New Year Has Started, So It Must Be SQL Saturday Nashville Time!

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Blogs

Happy New Year everyone! Hope the holiday season’s passing finds you well rested, well fed, and ready to hit the ground running. As year’s go, it was a relatively great year last year… as far as the SQL community goes in any case. But now that 2019 has started, it is time to get back … Read more

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Blogs

Louis Davidson 11 December 2018

Technique and Simple Utility to Determine the Datatype of a Scalar T-SQL Expression

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Blogs

Note: post revised to take into consideration tips from comments The other day, I was working with a query where someone had put together an expression that had something along the lines of: And I thought to myself… “Self, what will the datatype of this be? Will it fit what the programmer wanted it to … Read more

2

Blogs

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Louis Davidson