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
I’ve just started a project where I’ve had to set up Team City from scratch. Whilst I’ve used Team City extensively I’ve never had to start from the beginning, so I thought I’d document the steps I took. TeamCity is a Continuous Integration tool is free to use for small teams. It connects to your … Read more
I often joke that I wish cloning was perfected so that I could be two places at once. Sometimes, it is hard to decide which opportunity is more important, for example, my niece’s graduation party ended on up the same day as a concert with my favourite band. My ticket included a meet and greet … Read more
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
Last Friday (18th May 18) I attended Redgate’s SQL Privacy Summit in London. Before I go any further, for those of you who don’t know me, I’m based in the UK so GDPR is very much in the forefront of our minds and I am a Friend of Redgate. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend all day … Read more
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
Currently the project I’m working on is using Azure’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and we want to move to using Azure SQL Database on Platform as a Service (PaaS). The one thing stopping us doing that was cross database scripting, known in Azure terms as an Elastic Query. Before we agreed the move to … Read more
On 25th May GDPR comes into force. I’ve been learning everything I can about GDPR to ensure my systems adhere to the regulations and will be attending Redgate’s SQL Privacy summit, details and registration here on Friday 18th May in London . However I’ve been really shocked at the amount of developers I know who … Read more
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
I am one of the organisers of SQLBits and this year we decided to make some real effort with the Community Corner. Craig Porteous (@CPorteous) happened to offer to help at a time when we were considering how to make that happen. Craig runs Glasgow User Group and SQL GLA which ran for the first … Read more
I am a firm advocate of commenting code, but you need to make sure that you are commenting the right thing. I worked on a project last year and then the project was paused. I’m now back on it full time, some 6 months later. I wrote most of the database code and all calls … Read more
I have finally decided to start blogging and Redgate have kindly given me a platform to do it. So, what am I going to blog about? Well pretty much anything and everything that I come across that is vaguely SQL Server related. Hopefully a lot of Azure content while I’m getting to grips with it. … Read more
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
Every so often, I want to try a new location to go to, and possibly speak at, a SQL Saturday event. This year, my new experience will be to go to Jacksonville, FL for their event. It will only be the second time I have been in the city, the first time being on my … Read more
This week, I had a problem where I needed to find and eliminate from the results of my query, data with overlapping ranges. I have written about this topic before, in my database design book book, in regards to building a trigger to avoid overlapping ranges. But even though I have written on the topic … Read more
This week’s blog is a just about a few simple SQLCMD mode tricks for SSMS, but these tricks have saved me a lot of heartache over the years. If you have not used SQLCMD mode, you probably should be. I don’t intend to introduce SQLCMD too deeply, because there are tons of articles out there … Read more
I am working through my OneNote folder of blog ideas, and this one, while being one of the least consequential of them, was the most interesting tonight (and just may help you one day when converting data some day when you are wondering what the heck just happened in a query). You probably know that … Read more
Along with designing databases, I do a lot of ETL from, well, let’s call them “third party systems that I did not design or implement.” That may seem arrogant, but hey, I write books about database design so I should at least seem like I am able to do things right. In either case, when … Read more
In this blog, I want to explore what you can do to block the owner of a database from doing stuff in the database they “own”. Own is a strange term, because really there is just one user that is listed as owner, but there are there are three users who essentially are owner level, … Read more
Stored Procedures give you more freedom than functions, and so they would be the obvious way of developing processes in SQL Server. There is one longstanding problem with them though, although it is possible to send several results to the application from a stored procedure and read them without problems, you have big problems capturing more … Read more
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