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
SQL Saturday Jacksonville this weekend! Coming up this weekend, on the least holiest, but still very awesome holiday (May the Fourth), I will be in Jacksonville, Florida delivering a couple of sessions. Now, you might say: “Louis, why would you be travelling on May 4?” Check out the logo for Jacksonville’s event: That’s right, since … Read more
In today’s world, a user interacts with various apps/websites which require them to login or sign up via using their email address. There are a high chances of a person forgetting the username and the associated password to login or just completely giving up the sign up process as it asks a lot of information. … Read more
It is all to easy to build a database on a server and then expect it to be fully functional. Not so fast: There are a number of possibilities in terms of server-based functionality that can defeat you. Databases are likely to have scheduled jobs and alerts, and may have server triggers or even message … Read more
While I was preparing an article, I faced the challenge to extract the path from a filename in SQL Server. It’s an interesting challenge with many possible uses, so I decided to create a function to solve this problem. The Main Expression First, let’s understand the main expression to solve the problem. The path is everything … Read more
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
One of the common problems when you are developing databases is knowing what’s changed and when. You want to detect changes and to work out what has changed in a particular build. You’d have thought it would be an easy problem, when you consider that every database object in SQL Server’s system views has a … Read more
A few weeks ago, a coworker had a scenario where he was trying to import a large amount of data into some format (I think it was JSON, but I think it was a special limitation… that isn’t really important to the solution), and it didn’t allow certain characters. Narrowing down what the bad character … Read more
If you’ve been to a conference over the last few years, you’ve probably come across microservices. A microservice architecture consists of many highly decoupled services that are independently deployable and organized around business capabilities. This isn’t a new idea, SOA had similar ideas in the 90’s but the technology around it was clunky (it seemed … Read more
In order for a database system to work, you often need to provide programmable server objects. I’ve written very few databases that didn’t include agent jobs and triggers, or that didn’t require XEvents for diagnostics. These need to be scripted out in just the same way as database objects. . It can be done via … Read more
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
Each year, Redgate runs a survey to ask the folks at companies, from DBAs and Devs to CIOs, about how they monitor SQL Server. Those insights help us understand how we can make SQL Monitor more valuable to DBAs – or anyone responsible for the “care and feeding” of a SQL Server. The Estate Management … Read more
This is my first blog in a while and I’m sorry it’s not a technical one. You may be aware but I’m one of the SQLBits organisers which means that for the last few months all my spare time has been devoted to SQLBits organisation. We were really pleased with how the event went and … Read more
I am in the middle of a project to enable our corporate databases to work with continuous integration using RedGate SQL Automation (and hopefully get a few blogs/articles out of it too.) One of the things that the tool does is create your database in multiple ways, with multiple names, in order to compare to … Read more
Today’s blog is one of those topics that I just needed to get written down somewhere, and I expect that a few readers may find this interesting and want to do the same thing. In many of the Visual Studio projects we have where I work, there are Powershell and/or batch CMD files that we … Read more
SQL Server 2019 has some new and very interesting functions to identify information about pages. Many operations, such as analyzing current activities, locks or deadlocks, may result in some metadata pointing/blaming one page in the database. However, how to translate this information to get a database and object name? The image below is an example of … Read more
You are never too old to learn an important lesson. Like most programmers, I read programming language documentation for one of two reasons. 1. You have just found out about something new 2. You find out that you were wrong about something you thought you had read the first time, probably 10 years ago. Today’s … Read more
Wow, it has been a while since I last posted, with the holidays, and way too many other projects that I haven’t blogged about just yet because I haven’t found the time. Last June, the SQL Saturday in Chattanooga and SQL Server User Group lost their venue, as well as the leader of the group. … Read more
This article is about using the DOS Batch script facility of the Windows command line, together with SQLCMD to write the contents of each table in a database to the local filesystem. It shows how to use temporary stored procedures to advantage. Just to make it a bit harder, I’m doing it in extended JSON … Read more
SSMS new versions are full of very interesting features. With SQL Server 2019 arriving, it’s normal that our focus is captured by the new features in the database engine, however, SSMS has also a lot to offer. Let’s highlight some very interesting features this tool has to offer on its new versions. Vulnerability Assessment Sometimes … Read more
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