Louis Davidson 30 May 2022

The Job of a Technical Editor (as Louis sees it)

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One of the most essential parts of producing a great technical article, blog, or even a book, (referred to from now on generally as a work) is having someone who can check your writing and make sure it is right. You can do a mediocre job with grammar, punctuation, etc. and still produce technical resources … Read more

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Louis Davidson 21 March 2022

SQL Server Graph Tables – Cross Database Surprises

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Louis Davidson explains how to get around an interesting issue when doing cross-database queries involving graph database tables.… Read more

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Louis Davidson 17 March 2022

Starting My New Book – Step 1 – Prepare computer(s)

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The main gist of this article is that if you are starting any project where you want to both teach a subject or benchmark algorithms, the cleaner the machine you start with, the less competition you have from other software skewing the results. The only thing I installed on my new computer was SSMS and … Read more

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Louis Davidson 04 March 2022

Database Design Chats (and where the heck have I been?)

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This is going to be the last time I say it (well, at least on my blog). Last year sucked. Partly due to Covid as my wife was hit hard and still isn’t right after a year… honestly when I had it I was tired a little… not that that changed my opinion on what … Read more

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Louis Davidson 13 August 2021

Loading Existing Data Into SQL Graph Objects

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The SQL Server graph database feature allows you to model relationships that would be too complex for traditional relational tables. In this post, Louis Davidson demonstrates how to load existing data into graph objects in SQL Server. … Read more

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Louis Davidson 03 August 2021

Using Filetable to Find Duplicate Image Files with Different Names

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In my article “Filetables, Great For Business, Great For Hobbyist”, I implemented the basis of a hobby database I use for my Twitter accounts (@disneypicaday and @dollywoodp), where I post daily pictures of theme parks. As my inventory of prepped pictures has grown, one thing has become a major pain. Duplicates. I have tens of … Read more

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Louis Davidson 30 July 2021

What Counts For a DBA – Patients

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It’s been a while since I last wrote a new blog, and it has been a very long time since I last wrote a fresh new “What Counts For a DBA” entry. I celebrate this with a pun title. The last technical blog I wrote was scheduled to be published on March 19, 2021 and … Read more

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Louis Davidson 20 June 2021

Father and Father Figure’s Longterm Influence

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I have been very quiet lately. 3 months ago I had surgery, 2 weeks later I was back in the hospital with a bad infection and sepsis. A week later I was back after a life flight to the hospital. Another two weeks and I was back in the hospital again with another bad, but … Read more

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Louis Davidson 01 June 2021

What Counts for a DBA – Deadlines

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Everyone needs deadlines. Even the beavers. They loaf around all summer, but when they are faced with the winter deadline, they work like fury. If we didn’t have deadlines, we’d stagnate. ― Walt Disney I hate deadlines. Really. I truly hate them. The problem is: they are usually unrealistic, often not much more than a wild … Read more

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Louis Davidson 20 March 2021

Determining actions you can take with Edge and Node tables in SQL Server

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One of the interesting things about working with many-to-many relationships in SQL Server with graph tables instead of a relational table is that unlike a relational many-to-many table, by default an edge may can implement relationships from lots of different tables (nodes). You can also limit what nodes can be related using which edges. For … Read more

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Louis Davidson 15 March 2021

The Issue\Purpose of Multiple Edge Constraint/Conditions

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Edge constraints were added in SQL Server 2019 to make the node to edge relationship stricter/enforced, and more like typical foreign key constraints. When used, they define what node types can be used in the from and to position of the edge. What makes edges different than a many-to-many relationship in a relational table is … Read more

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Louis Davidson 12 March 2021

Ways to get and deal with invalid node identifiers in SQL Server Edge references

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One of the weirder things about graph tables in SQL Server is the mysterious backend implementation. The values you see when working with these objects look like this: {“type”:”node”,”schema”:”dbo”,”table”:”Node1″,”id”:0}, but when you get errors, you don’t see the json, you see what this represents (two integers for the object_id and unique id in the graph … Read more

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Louis Davidson 05 March 2021

Translating Index/Key Errors from Graph Tables in SQL Server

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As I am working with graph tables, I find some quirks exist that make them interesting to work with. One of them is how the values show up in some error messages (in particular from unique indexes). Instead of the details you expect\hope (Something like the JSON value you find in the id columns in … Read more

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Louis Davidson 18 February 2021

Function (and SQL Prompt Snippet) To Get Next Date By Day Name/Offset

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As I have been building my Twitter management software, I have been doing a lot more ad-hoc, repetitive coding using T-SQL directly. When I was generating new tweets for upcoming days, a bit of the process that got old quick was getting the date for an upcoming day (the primary key for my tweet table … Read more

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Louis Davidson 09 February 2021

Visualizing a set of SQL Server Graph tables by generating TGF Format

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In my last blog, I built some Powershell to take a graph that I had modelled and bring that into SQL Server in a format that could be imported into SQL Server node and edge tables. I have started on a tool to take that imported data and create a set of graph tables to … Read more

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Louis Davidson 29 January 2021

Using a Modeling Tool to Draw and Import a Graph into SQL Server

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As I am starting to prep for writing about graphs in SQL Server, I have reached the most challenging part of the process… demo data. That’s right, the code, the words, etc., all so much easier than making an example that demonstrates everything you want it to and has an easy way to present it … Read more

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Louis Davidson 26 October 2020

Ignore the technology for a moment, let’s talk about the problem

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Twelve and a half years ago I wrote my largest hit count article of my writing career Ten Common Database Design Mistakes. It currently shows as having over 1.2 million hits, despite having a misspelling in the first paragraph. After this length of time, you would think that things would have changed and we would … Read more

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Louis Davidson 16 September 2020

Filetables, Great For Business, Great For Hobbyist

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A feature I have never actually used professionally is filestream and filetable. We have a few file based solutions, but they are all packaged solutions. It is a feature that has intrigued me since it was released, but it has never been a fit for the kind of work I typically do (mostly transactions and … Read more

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Louis Davidson 02 September 2020

Weighted Randomization In T-SQL

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When I am not working on or writing about SQL, I am posting theme park pictures on Twitter of DisneyWorld (@DisneyPicADay) and Dollywood (@DollywoodP). The fun part of it is taking the pictures. The HARD part is deciding what to post every day. So instead of picking things from my head, I decided to harness … Read more

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Louis Davidson 18 August 2020

Trigger Validations and Isolation Levels

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Writing data integrity code in TRIGGER objects is generally is pretty simple. Typically you write a query to see “is there a row in inserted/deleted that is not set up as desired for the current transaction?” and no bad data is found, keep moving. And because MOST of the time, you would only use a … Read more

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Louis Davidson