Louis Davidson 11 December 2018

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

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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

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Louis Davidson 06 December 2018

I Have an Exclusive Lock, My Row Is Safe, Right?

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Note: This is an update of a blog I posted in 2006 with a lot of additional information (I was less wordy in my 30s apparently). It is just as relevant today. I have a presentation I do occasionally on concurrency entitled “Let Me Finish” that covers many of the different types of concurrency behaviors … Read more

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Louis Davidson 26 November 2018

PASS Summit Wrap-up and 2019 PASS Resolutions

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Most years, by the time the PASS Summit has finished, I have at least written the basics of my wrap-up blog to the conference, usually when I am sitting at SEATAC eating my breakfast pizza from the little Italian restaurant. It may take me a few days or a week to post it, but that … Read more

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Louis Davidson 03 November 2018

PASS Summit Resolutions 2017 Followup

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The summit is my favorite time of year, but this is literally my least favorite post of every year (and yes, I do consider NOT posting it every year, this year more than most!) It is that time when I take my previous year’s resolutions (centered squarely on the most important 12-ish month period, from … Read more

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Louis Davidson 09 October 2018

Calculating a Security Principal’s Complete Effective Rights

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In my blog Calculating a Security Principal’s Effective Rights. I built a view, named Utilty.EffectiveSecurity that you could query to fetch a security principal’s rights to objects in a database. In that blog I tested the code and showed how it works. Now I have taken this to the extreme and expanded the view to … Read more

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Louis Davidson 01 October 2018

Speaking at SQL Saturday Memphis on October 6

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There are several SQL Saturday events I have attended every event that has existed. Louisville, Nashville, Chattanooga (didn’t speak one of the years), and (I am pretty sure) Birmingham. On October 6, I will add one more to this list. The inaugural SQL Saturday Memphis! Having lived in Nashville for 20 or so years before … Read more

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Louis Davidson 26 September 2018

Calculating a Security Principal’s Effective Rights

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Security. Oh that most painful of topics. I discussed it a few months earlier when I discussed the need to give rights only through roles to users, so everything is the same in dev and prod except the users who are placed in each role (SQL Server Database Security And Source Control). As I was … Read more

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Louis Davidson 05 September 2018

Using WITH in an IF Condition

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I am in the middle of working on my DB Design conference that occurs in a bit over a week from now. But I had this come up in some work I was doing and wanted to put it down in a blog. One of the most exciting features of SQL Server 2005 was the … Read more

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Louis Davidson 15 August 2018

Teaching a Database Design and Implementation Class in Orlando 9-13

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Thanks to Andy Warren (@sqlandy), on Thursday, September 13, I will be in Orlando, FL teaching an all-day seminar on the process of designing and implementing a relational database, entitled “Constructing a SQL Server Database.” Throughout the following 7 modules, we will make some requirements, model the database, create tables, with foreign keys, check constraints, … Read more

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Louis Davidson 08 August 2018

Finding duplicated data in a case insensitive column

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The other day, I had a problem with some data that I never dreamed I would ever see. In a case insensitive database, in a table’s column that was case insensitive, the customer was using the data as case sensitive. Firstly, let’s just go ahead and say it. “This was a sucky implementation.” But as … Read more

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Louis Davidson 07 August 2018

Speaking on Database Design at SQL Saturday Indianapolis on 8/11

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This weekend, I will be taking the short 7.5 hour drive up to Indianapolis, IN for my second SQL Saturday in Indianapolis. I will be speaking on my favorite topic, Database Design, hoping to give at least a few people the secrets of how to design their database if so if I ever have to … Read more

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Louis Davidson 27 July 2018

A performance issue with self-referencing tables

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I have a great interest in hierarchy solutions, as I plan to write a book on implementing hierarchies in SQL Server in the next year or so (after I see what happens in SQL Server vNext after 2017). Something I didn’t include in my design testing when I built my presentation on hierarchies (available from … Read more

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Louis Davidson 16 July 2018

Speaking on Row Level Security at SQL Saturday Louisville 7/21

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Coming up this weekend, I will be at my 10th SQL Saturday 729 in Louisville, KY. My topic will be row level security and dynamic data masking. Implementing Row Level Security in SQL Server Since the early days of SQL Server, it has been possible to use basic security measures to allow (and disallow) user … Read more

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Louis Davidson 09 July 2018

T-SQL Tuesday #104: Code You Would Hate To Live Without (Relative Positioning in Date Table)

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Today’s blog post is in response to Bert Wagner’s invitation here: https://bertwagner.com/2018/07/03/code-youd-hate-to-live-without-t-sql-tuesday-104-invitation/. For me, the answer was pretty simple. There is one piece of code that I have written that I find very useful, and even more… it was my (as far as I know, my own idea!) In my life, I have obviously learned a … Read more

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Louis Davidson 01 July 2018

Honored and Humbled to get my 14th Microsoft MVP Award

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I don’t know if I can put into words how much I appreciate this award, so I won’t try too hard. I will say that feels really weird to be happening in July. For the first 13 years I had the award, the announcement was my kind of unofficial launch of the holidays in early … Read more

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Louis Davidson 20 June 2018

Row-wise system function calls, always the same?

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Assumptions are generally terrible things for programmers (and likely my next “What Counts” blog goes there), because what looks to be true when trying things out on your machine, may not be so at a larger scale. There are lots of examples out there, sorting when there’s a clustered index, not checking errors because you … Read more

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Louis Davidson 31 May 2018

Why Design and Test Your Utility Code for Publishing?

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As the saying goes: do to others as you would have them do to you. When writing code, I would suggest a complimentary saying of “do to yourself as you would to do others”. Write your software as if it will be used by a very wide audience, even if you aren’t planning on being the … Read more

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Louis Davidson 17 May 2018

SQL Server Database Security and Source Control

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Maintaining database security can be a complex task. In this post, Louis Davidson describes a method that can be used to maintain separate security for multiple environments (e.g., production and development) without changes to the database itself. … Read more

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Louis Davidson 11 May 2018

SQL Saturday Atlanta is next weekend – Speaking on Hierarchies

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On May 19, a very busy day for SQL Saturday events (Atlanta, Dallas, and New York in the US, and Kyiv, Catania and Belo Horizonte elsewhere), I will be speaking in Atlanta on a subject that I am becoming more and more interested in: Hierarchies. This is the abstract: How to Implement a Hierarchy in … Read more

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Louis Davidson 30 April 2018

Operator Precedence versus the Confusing Constraint Translation

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The other day, a person I work with was creating some fairly complex CHECK constraints to protect data in a new table that was being created (a practice I am 100% for: https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/blogs/eliminating-annoying-space-characters-via-check-constraints/. The multiple constraints were combined into just one, with several conditions condensed into a single Boolean expression, using several ANDs, ORs, and … Read more

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Compliant Database DevOps

By need

By role

Louis Davidson