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Phil Factor

Phil Factor

Phil Factor (real name withheld to protect the guilty), aka Database Mole, has 40 years of experience with database-intensive applications. Despite having once been shouted at by a furious Bill Gates at an exhibition in the early 1980s, he has remained resolutely anonymous throughout his career. See also :

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Phil Factor
20 March 2019
Phil Factor
20 March 2019

Scripting out several databases on a server

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A while ago, I wrote an article Automated Script-generation with Powershell and SMO about using SMO to script out a SQL Server database. It has remained surprisingly but agreeably popular. SMO is still there, but now part of the sqlserver module that is included with SSMS and downloadable. Someone recently asked me whether it was … Read more
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Phil Factor
26 February 2019
Phil Factor
26 February 2019

What are Inline Indexes?

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New releases of SQL Server arrive at a quick pace, and it's difficult to keep up with the many features introduced in each version. In this article, Phil Factor reviews a feature you may have missed, inline indexes. He covers the syntax and the many ways they can be used and then performs some performance tests to see if they can make a difference with table variables.… Read more
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Phil Factor
08 February 2019
Phil Factor
08 February 2019

Using Temporary Procedures

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I’ve often read in forums how people have special utility databases with all their stored procedures and functions for working on the databases on the server. It is great because you don’t want your utilities intruding into the actual databases that you are developing or testing. The problem is that it doesn’t work. Let me … Read more
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Phil Factor
09 January 2019
Phil Factor
09 January 2019

SQL naming conventions

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SQL naming conventions for tables, and all the associated objects such as indexes, constraints, keys and triggers, are important for teamwork. Poorly-named tables and other objects make it difficult to maintain databases. Table names must follow the rules for SQL Server identifiers, and be less than 128 characters. It is possible to force SQL Server to … Read more
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Phil Factor
27 September 2018
Phil Factor
27 September 2018

Extended Events Workbench

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The Extended Events (or XEvents) feature has been part of SQL Server since 2008, but many database professionals struggle to get started using it. In this article, Phil Factor demonstrates several useful Extended Event sessions that measure just one thing in each. He then provides the code necessary to parse the resulting XML into something you can use.… Read more
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Phil Factor
08 August 2018
Phil Factor
08 August 2018

Spoofing Data Convincingly: Credit Cards

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I haven’t seen a SQL Server table with real unencrypted credit card numbers for several years, and I don’t know of any good reasons to have them stored that way. However, I’ve needed them in the past for testing a web application that had to take credit card details. Generating credit cards in a way … Read more
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Phil Factor
17 July 2018
Phil Factor
17 July 2018

Spoofing Data Convincingly: Altering Table Data

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When you are developing an existing database, or demonstrating it, you nowadays need pseudonymised data, or even better, completely anonymized data. This data has to look right at first glance, and it needs to have the same distribution as the real data. Although we are yet to tackle continuous variables with complicated distributions such as … Read more
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