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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03 December 2019
03 December 2019

The Gloop: An Easier way of Managing SQL Server Documentation

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Here, in this blog, I’m continuing a theme that I started in a previous blog, ‘What’s in that database? Getting information about routines’. In that blog, I just wanted to provide a few examples of extracting metadata from SQL Server into Powershell and hinting about why one might want to do it. I’ll now show … Read more
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02 May 2019
02 May 2019

Enjoying Joins in MongoDB

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MongoDB has a prodigious appetite for unstructured data and has its place in a Database Developer’s toolkit. Even with indexes in place, some operations that involve aggregation are a lot slower than they are with relational databases: So it is when using ‘joins’ between collections. Lookup, the MongoDB equivalent to Joins, cannot yet do Merge … Read more
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09 April 2019
09 April 2019

Using JSON for matrices in SQL Server.

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From SQL Server 2017, it becomes more practical to use JSON arrays for representing and processing a matrix. SQL Server can read them, and update values in them but can’t create them. To do this, you have to create the JSON as a string. The great advantage of them is that you can pass them … Read more
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20 March 2019
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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26 February 2019
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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08 February 2019
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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09 January 2019
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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