A few weeks ago I faced this problem: One query on my application was (fortunately in the development environment) was facing a very bad execution time. Since the query was generated by entity framework, I used SQL Profiler to capture the query with all its parameters and execute in SSMS. The query was created using … Read more
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
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
So you have a database with JSON in it. Can you validate it? I don’t mean just to ensure that it is valid JSON, but ensure that the JSON contains values that are legitimate. Are NI values, postcodes or bank codes valid? Can the dates or GUIDs be successfully parsed? Are those integers really integers? … Read more
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
When I read the list of new features in SQL Server 2019 I became very proud of my crystal ball powers. In July 2017 I published an article about Graph Database feature in SQL Server 2017. In this article, besides showing the improvements and benefits I also highlighted one problem: the lack of graph edge … Read more
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
JSON was initially designed for the informal transfer of data that has no schema. It has no concept of a table, or of an array of identical arrays. This means that it must tell you each key for each object, even if the original data object was a table. With the happy minimum of key-value … Read more
I’m a lifelong learner. One of the ways I love to learn is by reading books. While I was making the transition to software development from my original career, I read the book “Code Complete” by Steve McConnell. This was back in the mid-90s before the Agile Manifesto was written or DevOps was a thing. … Read more
One great result from PASS Summit, especially when we are close to a new SQL Server release, is to identify important technologies to study on the following year. PASS Summit 2018 was great, with sessions about many new technologies giving us very good guidance on where to focus our study for the new year. Let’s … Read more
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
If you are, as you should be, checking JSON data in a whole lot of files before you import them into your database, you would do well to use JSON Schema, because you can run a number of checks such as regex checks that can’t be done any other way, and it is usually possible … Read more
You might think that it is easy to get JSON data from a spreadsheet, and there are plenty of utilities around that are based on the idea that it is trivial. If such data was strictly tabular, then it might be. The problem is that any conversion tool makes assumptions about the way that data … Read more
We’re going to set up a web service for a SQL Server database using node js on a windows server. This is intended for a mobile application, but has a variety of other uses where an ODBC connection isn’t possible. This service is purely done as a demonstration for people with a database background, so … Read more
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
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
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
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
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
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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